Session 3, Part 1

By Heather Posted Friday Sep 30, 2005

Filed under: D&D Campaign 12 comments

4th of Last Summer, 1501dy (early morning)

The day is overcast. Above ground this church is destroyed. All that remains is a two-foot wall making the outline where the building once stood. The building was made from large stone block, and large pale stones are scattered throughout the tall grass. Inside, two sets of stairs (one on each side of the building) lead down into the earth.

Thordek notes that a large curving stairway leads down into a dank basement area. Black staining along the bottom of the stone block walls shows that this area is damp or flooded during some parts of the year, although it’s dry right now. At random, they choose the southern set of stairs to investigate.


Thu’fir listens carefully at the top of the stairs. Nothing. They head down. Eomer stays behind to guard the entrance.

Pat missed the first couple of hours of this session, so aside from dealing with some locked doors, his character (Eomer) remained behind. This really hurt the group, since a rogue would have made a lot of the challenges they faced much easier.

-Shamus

The room is empty aside from the door leading north. It is locked. Skeeve goes upstairs and gets Eomer so he can unlock the door for them.

The keyhole is rusty. Eomer attempts to pick it but can not open it. He manages to jam the lock in the attempt. Since they can’t enter this way unless they force the door, the party decides to try the other entrance.

This room is the mirror image of the southern one. There is a large stone block, about 3×3 foot (looks like one of the major blocks from upstairs) The top of the block is stained with old blood. An axe rests on the stone. There is a small pile of chopped firewood here, beside the chopping block. There is a locked door leading south.

Skeeve calls Eomer to help him try this door. Eomer fails again. Once again, the lock is jammed. They have now jammed both entrances. They talk about what to do next. The doors are old rotting wood, but the wood is quite thick and framed in iron.

Eomer made four lock-pick attempts this session. The first two were rolled by me and the latter were rolled by Pat once he joined the game later in the evening. In order, the rolls were 2, 2, 1, and 1. I don’t usually record dice rolls, but these were so unlikely I thought I should note them here. He was just very unlucky. There was nothing unusually difficult about the locks he faced.

-Shamus

Thordek finally grows tired of debate and begins hammering on the northern door. The sound is tremendous, and echoes in the small room. They know they have lost any chance at surprise or stealth.

After nearly an hour of labor, Thordek has broken open the bottom half of the door, allowing the party to squeeze through. They find themselves in a hallway that looks like it was once nicely decorated. The remains of a rug, now tattered and consumed by mildew, runs down the center of the floor. Directly opposite of them is the other set of double-doors that they jammed earlier.

They check the hallway. From here they may go south through a new set of double doors, or explore a single door that faces north. They examine the double doors, then turn back and go through the single door.

This is a dining area. A large rustic wooden table sits in the center of the room, along with a single chair. The table looks newer than other wooden items (such as doors) you see about. While suffering from bad moisture damage, its certainly “new” compared to other items around. It and the chair look to be poorly made. They are rough and unevenly cut from untreated wood.

Thordek searches the room and finds a silver fork under the table. He also notices a few crumbs on the table and chair that indicate they have been used recently. They note that there is a door in the room but decide to look back the hallway a bit prior to looking in there.

As they move in front of the double doors, a large trapdoor opens beneath them. Thu’fir falls but Skeeve catches himself on the edge, dropping his staff in the process, almost falling in himself.

Thu’fir lands in darkness twenty feet down, on a set of sharp spikes. Thordek pulls Skeeve up. Skeeve cries out the name of his staff, “Sucursis!”. The staff obeys and returns to his hand. He casts levitate on Thu’fir and they help him out of the hole. Enoch heals his wounds, which are severe, but not life-threatening.

While still levitating Thu’fir moves over to the door to open it, and floats through. The others prepare to jump across. The jump is a bit difficult, since they must jump diagonally over the pit and through a doorway. The diagonal means they can’t get a good running jump, and the door frame means they can’t shorten the jump by cutting the corner. The jump is only four feet, but will still be a bit tricky. Skeeve casts jump and leaps across without effort. Enoch and Beck follow. Thordek falls in. Skeeve casts levitate to lift him out. They are now in another hallway, similar to the last. There are two doors along the south wall.

Continued in Part 2…
 


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12 thoughts on “Session 3, Part 1

  1. Dan says:

    i didn’t have lighting at that time

  2. Dan says:

    “lightning”

  3. Shamus says:

    Ha. I didn’t notice you’d mispelled it until you corrected it.

  4. inflatable says:

    Nice jumper,nice post too. :)

  5. Seve says:

    I would have backtracked to that door on dining room to see easier access to other parts of this church.

    Traps would of been deadly to some lower level chars I presume…

  6. Russell Eldrin says:

    …why did a church have a spike trap? some sort of vicious deacon hazing?…actually that sounds pretty awesome.

  7. WT says:

    The monks at Lindisfarne probably wished they had spike traps.

  8. AAT says:

    The monks at Lindisfarne probably wished they had a lot of things, starting with combat experience and weapons…. that WEREN’T embedded in their bodies.

  9. dunereader says:

    Do you allow characters to take 20 on lock picking? after the first lock pick failed that’s probably what I would have done on the second to be safe. It also seems strange that a 5th level wizard would memorize to levitate spells (that’s 2 of his 3 second level spells isn’t it?)

    1. John Magnum says:

      The d20 SRD suggests that taking 20 is common for Open Lock, although there may be a house rule that invalidates it. It sounds like a serious enough failure resulted in the lock being jammed–that kind of penalty for failure would preclude taking 20.

      Skeeve probably had four second-level spell slots. Two from the base class progression, one from his Int modifier, and probably one from school specialization. Levitation has been useful enough for Skeeve that it seems reasonable for him to prepare it multiple times. And, as always, there’s the possibility of house rules.

      1. Cuthalion says:

        Don’t know if you’ll ever see this, but it’s the same year, so why not?

        They used house rules to have energy-based spellcasting like in a computer RPG. So Skeeve would’ve been able to cast any spell he knew, with a restriction on the total energy available and higher level spells costing more.

  10. I would’ve just pulled the table over or pulled a door off, and made a bridge across the spike trap rather than jumping it.

    D&D Players need to think outside the box more!

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