If you are a member of this campaign, you should not read this.

Session 3 Judge’s Notes

    The session began with Bill and Brad present initially, as usual. Jake was able to join a little late. Sam has said that he basically will have no time to play because of work, so the group is open to a new player. Jake mentioned that he knew someone who might be interested, so we’ll see if that pans out. Until then, Earl said recently that he’d be able to attend the sessions moving forward, so we’ll still have 5 players.

    I was honestly shocked when the party survived the Assassin Vine. The flames burned the vines for good damage, while the party was mostly spared. Still, Basil went down a few times and suffered a lingering injury (a concussion, which is -4 REF).

    After they retreated aboveground, I rolled a beastman patrol encounter. I had the beastmen just send a scout to look over the wall (drawn there by the smoke from the fire), and, when they saw they were just a group of adventurers, they decided to leave. I thought this made the most sense, as I figured the patrol was mostly just in the area to either scout or forage for food.

    Heading back down, the group encountered the shambling mound, which I decided would hide in the fountain during the fire. Later, I realized it wouldn’t necessarily need to do that, as it is immune to fire damage, but maybe it would make sense, as just chilling in a raging inferno is probably at least a little uncomfortable.

    Seeing the shambling mound, the group wisely ran away. At this point, I realized that I made another (sigh) mistake. There’s actually a door in that chamber that leads to an obelisk that looks out towards the river. I actually forgot to narrate or indicate that to the party. To fix this, I decided to just move the obelisk a little north, out in the open where the party should be able to easily find it. I figured this would be fair, as they likely would’ve at least had a chance to find the obelisk themselves. I remember Brad said something like “so even using fire to burn out the jungle room wasn’t enough to get the treasure the dwarf smelled down here, eh?” I suppose my response to that, left unsaid, is simply that burning things with oil isn’t exactly a novel strategy, though it was effective in this case.

    So, it seems I’ve made a few impactful mistakes so far. Still, mistakes are to be expected, especially with a module like this. The main issue I have with the module is that room descriptions are often several paragraphs long, with the important information buried at seemingly random points. For example, the few key sentences I’d like to narrate to the party are sometimes preceded by three or four paragraphs explaining what the original use of the room was. I’ll have to get a little better about underlining key parts of the text, though this does take a significant amount of prep time.

    Speaking of prep, I recently completed the Goblin Warrens (Sub-level 4), which is nice. If I can complete the Tombs of Light (Sub-level 1) and the rest of Level 3, I’ll be in a pretty good spot as far as prep is concerned for a while. There’s enough content there to keep them occupied for multiple months, I’m sure. Of course, there is always a chance the party finds an unexpected way to journey to deeper levels (for example, the Goblin Warrens connect to levels 5, 6, and 7, none of which I have prepped at all), so I’ll have to keep trying to prep ahead of them.

    I do have my worries concerning the prep time needed for running this. On the one hand, I absolutely love the “Jaquaified” (that is, non-linear) nature of Arden Vul for the great number of choices it gives the players. On the other hand, the more non-linear it is, the harder it is to predict the movements of the party, and thus the more prep time is needed. I’m hoping I’ll hit a point soon where I have basically all of the possible/likely routes forward prepped, and thus have no pressing need to prep for a long time. Because my enthusiasm for campaigns naturally wanes over time, I like the front-end-loaded nature of prep for the module. One strategy I might have to employ is to do theatre of the mind for un-prepped areas that the party might unexpectedly wander into, and then build them out in the week following the session.

    As far as likely party routes goes, speaking from experience, I believe this group is very much in the camp of “clear one level at a time, top to bottom.” So far, they have stuck to this by focusing on the ruins level (level 0). One of the things I like about this module is how it subverts this common strategy through non-linearity and the fact that the ruins level contains relatively little treasure, and a great deal of danger. With perfect information, I think I can say that the best strategy for the party is to explore either the cellar that leads to level 1, or enter the Pyramid of Thoth to level 3, just as the rumors they received told them. For some reason, the party has completely ignored these rumors, and I’m not sure if it’s because they don’t trust them (they’ve been burned in past campaigns, to be fair), or if they just weren’t paying attention.

    The group got back to town and totaled their earnings: about 500gp, a potion, a lock-picking set +1, and three +1 items: a shield, leather armor, and a short sword. Not bad, if you ask me! This is especially so considering that they had zero casualties, which I did not expect. I think if I ran the Assassin Vine fight as written it would’ve gone differently, but that was due to my mistake, and the creature is absolutely insane anyways, if you ask me.

    I can’t help but compare this group to the one currently releasing Arden Vul episodes on the 3d6 Down the Line youtube channel. That group has had about three sessions and two PC deaths so far in their firstjourney to the ruins. Still, I think the 3d6 DTL group is a lot more reckless than my group, so the discrepancy is probably deserved.

    At the end of the session, the partyrested for six days in Glosterwick and was ready to head out at the beginning of next session. I decided to retcon the last four days, as I re-wrote the rules on downtime activities and hirelings. We’ll pick up after the party has rested for two days in town at the start of the next session. We’re also going to roll up Earl’s character, so I’m excited!