T w e n t y S i d e d
Four hours after the party began their rest, Eomer rouses the them with a yell, “Hey, I heard something!”
Before they can act, another centipede is on them. They leap to their feet and engage it. This time the fight goes more smoothly and the thing dies without inflicting much harm.
Skeeve has recovered his magic, but Enoch has not. They elect to move on at this point anyway. They head down the hallway and find the trap door has been reset, and is now closed again. Not wanting to set it off again, they jump over the solid ground. Thordek mis-jumps and lands on the trap area. This doesn’t set it off. A few other party members make the jump, and then Beck fails. The trap springs, the door opens, and he falls.
They are confused by this. Wasn’t this the second time it was touched? Thodek points out that the centipede would have been the first thing to cross it, making Beck the third.
They levitate him up and Enoch heals him. They lament once again that they lost their ropes in the shipwreck.
They follow the hallway around until they are on the north side, beside the trap door. They go into another room which is not a filthy mess like the others. The door is left open a bit.
A crude bed frame is here, built from newly cut, untreated lumber. The mattress looks like two blankets, sewn together and stuffed full. There is a lantern on the floor by the bed.
They go to the next room. Thordek goes first and a trap door over the entrance to this room drops a pile of stone blocks on him. He is pummeled.
Eomer, sick of waiting outside, decides to join the party. Beck goes outside, since this place seems too crowded for six people.
-Shamus
This room is empty, save for a small wooden chest in the northwest corner. Thordek walks over to it. The brash Dwarf attempts to open the chest. Fine powder explodes from the chest, covering everything in the room. Thordek manages to hold his breath, thus saving him from breathing in any of the foul grey dust. He dashes from the room looking like a floured dumpling.
Eomer rebukes him for being so reckless.
They wait twenty minutes or so for the dust to settle out of the air in the room so that it will be safe to enter. Thordek goes back in and searches the chest.
He finds a book, some gold, and a bleached human skull which is being used as a bowl to hold some strange powder.
They open the next door. It is a simple room with a new wooden bed and a small (unlit) lamp. The bed is poorly built but looks used. The blankets are not filthy, rotting rags at any rate.
They move on to the final door. This is a large door facing east. Before attempting to unlock it, they decide to deal with the trap to the north, since it is pointing right at them and probably tied to the door in some way.
Thordek wants to smash it, but Eomer has him back off so he can try to disable it. He fails and sets it off. He tells Thordek to smash the trap. Thordek walks over and whacks into the center of the mechanism with his hammer. Bam! Four arrows shoot out over Eomer’s head and into the opposite wall. Thordek tries again and breaks the mechanism.
Eomer now moves onto the door. He tries to pick the lock but manages to fail again. It is jammed.
Skeeve tells everyone to stand back, and then uses flaming sphere to burn out the door. The door is engulfed in flames. The aged, thick wood gives off a thick acrid smoke as it burns. The chamber is filled with smoke and they retreat to the entrance for a while until the smoke dissipates. The group is now concerned that if the children are inside they may have asphyxiated.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
As I am reading this while also reading DM of the Rings, I am getting a certain amount of glee from the party’s lack of rope…
And lack of detect trap rolls… unless one is in hurry that should be top priority alongside detect secret doors rolls.
To Seve: As a person that plays a rogue in most of my games I find that the party rarely actually gives rogues enough time to detect traps in each and every room. As such my detect traps skill usually consists of pushing the stupid human fighter into the room before me… or as I picked up later in the game, carrying a sack of rocks and throwing them ahead of me. Not the best system but it worked alright considering. I’ve never been in a group that actually gave me enough time to detect traps the proper way it is set up.
Arelion, searching for traps should not be random, since it takes ages, and any sound in-character player won’t let you do that for days. it’s also not the best thing to do tactically.
as a rogue, I used to think about reasonable positions for traps, like particular doorways (not main ones, since people are supposed to go through them, choke points, chests, places that being stopped there would mean trouble (no use putting stand-alone non-lethal traps) and concentrate my search there. In the most traps-saturated places I just crawled my way in, alone, searching for switches. the rest of the gang just waited for me in the back.