Skip to main content

After Action Report: Strata + Shadowdark: Session 1

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.

 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Names

  Note : There are a lot of external links in this post. None of them should be affiliate links If they are, please let me know . Note2 : This has been bouncing around in my brain informally for a while, but putting it to pixel was prompted by Rook’s post on names on Beneath Foreign Planets as part of the RPG Blog Carnival .  There’s a lot of great material that comes from these prompts. I encourage you, dear reader, to check that out. Note3 : Link to the GDoc version this post was originally composed in. On Names One of the holes new Game Masters fall into while playing D&D-esque games is names. I’ll start with random NPC names first, to get the subject out of the way:  Make a d20 or d100 list of names for each gender, and for families.  Either stick it on the fourth panel of your DM screen, or pre-roll five of each, and stick those lists on your fourth panel. If you need a list of real world names, use an onomastikon .   Onomastikon “What is an on...
2 comments
Read more

How I Generate Home Brew Fantasy Towns Quickly

I was prompted to write this by an article about world building  ( https://ofdiceanddragons.com/rpg-carnival-world-building/ ). One of the challenges of a  gamemaster (GM) is spending time building things that are useful in play.  From that  point of view, after sketching out the world in thirty words, it seems more productive to me to focus on the places the player characters are most likely to go.   Generally, for a sandbox style exploration game in the West Marches style, I want it to be some sort of town or small city.  A village is too small to do more than provide food and fodder, and maybe shelter in a farmer’s barn.  A large city can be an interesting setting, but is probably a little too large for a new GM to start with, even though it basically extrapolates on what’s outlined here. Why? In our elf games, we typically focus on going to wild or hostile places to bring something back or handle a threat.  We don’t really spend much time in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Elements of Magic Weapons, and Most Especially the Side Effects of Wielding Them

Through September Attronarch of Attronarch's Athenaeum is hosting September 2024's RPG Blog Carnival!  The theme is  Wondrous Weapons and Damning Dweomers .  In relation to that, I would like to talk about the elements of generating a magical weapon with a touch more depth than Old Gary got into. Typical D&D weapons provide a benefit, but with no drawback.  This is great as far as it goes, but I believe a little more thought should be put into it, since each weapon should have the following elements: A numeric bonus An allegiance An intended enemy A weapon effect A side-effect First, I believe all magic weapons should have a numeric bonus, even if it's just +1 to hit and damage.  Call me old-fashioned. Second, gentle reader, all weapons should have some sort of magical effect, even if it's just an elemental damage bonus.  Weapons are made for a purpose, and are made by some person or group.  The makers of the weapon set the allegiance. That doesn'...
Post a Comment
Read more