Márta Benedek, a devout Muslim from the ever-swelling ranks of the Benedek family (a female dominated clan who turns its daughters loose on the world as adventurers).
Octavia, an educated woman, both an alchemist and an arcanist.
K'rizzt Tri'Orgen, a "connoisseur" of dark elf culture so obsessed that he'd dyed and painted his skin to look just like them.
Past experience prompted me to create a map that I could reveal to the players, but K'rizzt's player said he wanted to map "old school style," so I took that as a cue to be lazy. This was a mistake. K'rizzt was ambushed by the nasty combo of a nap and real life obligations so we started with Márta and Octavia. They get their instructions from Sam Sump and head out to deliver the package. "You can't miss it, they camped near the big tower in the middle of the forest." Almost immediately we run into a problem. Between the player's map they were drawing on the roll20 being a different orientation than the one I had on my desk and my own spatial dyslexia, we had an argument about compass roses which resulted in, among other things, me deciding that Mecca was on the moon so that Octavia didn't have to keep track of which direction to pray for Salah. It was an hour later that I realized this would only eliminate the issue of midday prayer, as the moon's orbit still made relative orientations relevant.
After descending the tunnel bored by the shamir, Octavia and Márta found themselves in a statue garden. They were able to figure out that there was a secret passage somewhere in the walls, but that the air in the hidden passage was stagnant.
Márta, why are you waving a torch around the edges of this room?
To see if there's a vacuum that would suck the flames towards it, indicating the presence of a secret door.
What's a vacuum? (clearly Octavia had missed some crucial concepts in her alchemy education)
It's what separates us from Mecca.
At this point, K'rizzt came tumbling down the tunnel to the surface and promptly introduced himself. The three of them decided to investigate the dwarven dormitories and discovered Luria the sorceress. Octavia was able to tell the men and woman dressed in revealing novelty clothing were under some sort of mind-control spell. Luria had sent Gwen topside to "hunt an owlbear" because she thought it was funny. It became clear that their plan of "go into the dungeon, trade the package with the adventurers for 1000 SP, maybe poke around for some more treasure, bring it back to Brazenkragg" had become a lot more complicated. Luria suggested there might be some scraps of treasure lying around the dungeon. She hadn't explored the whole place and there was bound to be some stuff she missed.
The trio headed back into the statue garden, carefully opened the hatch in the middle of the floor, and had a peek. Satisfied no horrible gribblies were waiting to ambush them, they climbed down into the second level of the dungeon. They found an expansive grid of tunnels carved into the rock, the walls covered in dwarven runes. This section was very confusing for the party, because they thought it was a series of rooms, when in fact it was closer to a massive cavern with interesting terrain. K'rizzt took every opportunity to make fun of how dumb and ugly the dwarves and their writing system were.
Eventually, they found their way to the coal mines. The walls were plastered with warnings. Octavia informed the rest of the party that these were messages from the cult of the dwarven goddess OSHA. Márta wasn't too keen on foreign gods, but agreed that heeding their warning was probably a good idea. Then Octavia tossed a lit torch into the coal mines. A massive fireball roared out of the mouth of the cavern as the trio dove for cover behind the stone corners of the grid. Satisfied that she had burnt out enough of the combustible material, Octavia led the trio through the coal mines.
They found a small room with what looked like a hole in the ceiling plugged with mycelium but decided not to interfere. They also decided against going deeper through a sinkhole they found. There was a large coal mining cavern with hundreds of tiny footprints, clearly leading to a secret door somewhere. Instead they decided to turn back and investigate a central storage room they'd seen in the center of the mining grid. I actually read off the wrong room description but it ended up not mattering. They found the secret compartment behind a loose brick, and spotted the poison needle before it could stab anyone. Lacking any specialized thief skills, K'rizzt opted to shove a random bone they'd found into the hole to trigger the trap. They were then able to pull the whole apparatus out while it slowly leaked pure ethanol. Octavia wondered aloud if it was drinkable. K'rizzt told her that "Those stupid dwarves with their stupid livers could probably drink it, but it's a poison for anyone else." She shrugged and pocketed the vial and needle for later use. But not before liberating the bottle of fine dwarven gin.
After this, they headed upstairs to check out the drinking hall again. This time, they actually looked inside the room with their torch out and found the storage room. I transposed the storage room from floor 2 to here, solving my previous mixup and they were happy to find a fancy abacus. K'rizzt found the secret door to the vaults in the statue garden, but they were disappointingly low on treasure. Someone had raided them a long time ago. Returning to the statue garden, they discovered the maintenance closet for the hypocaust that once kept the tiled floors toasty warm.
We had a brief break for water while I popped off to ask mellon how exactly the dungeon was put together, because it wasn't super clear where the massive pipe actually went. Mellon offered some suggestions and in the interest of keeping the dungeon open, I ruled that they could traverse the cooling tower with K'rizzt's grappling hook and 50' of rope. At the end of the pipe, the trio found themselves staring down into a massive lake. K'rizzt jammed the grappling hook between some rivets and a service valve and cautiously began his descent. With his Sneaking skill, he did not alert the massive man-shaped thing clothed in in a multicolored garment hunched over a pile of scrolls. To pass the time, Márta asked Octavia if she knew of any other dwarven gods. "Well, there's FEMA, the goddess of mercy..." I told K'rizzt's player that even though there was about ten feet between the surface of the lake and the end of the rope, he could still drop down without making a big splash because of his Sneaking skill. He considered alpha-striking the creature with a sneak attack from his crossbow, but decided against it. The thing was wearing a cloak made out of stitched together wizard robes and a stack of wizard hats, it was probably a magic-user. Best not to risk it.
The trio made their way up the pipe, concerned that they were still 380 silver pieces short of their obligation to Sam Sump, the trade warden. Coming out of the pipe, they ran straight into Luria. Thanks to a lucky reaction roll, she was in a good mood. She asked them what they'd seen 'downstairs,' and after a muttered conversation, they told her about the large creature by the lake. Luria told them it was probably an ogre mage, "They can be fun sometimes, but their dicks are a bit too big to really do anything with." Then, wanting to get the party out of her hair, she told them that northwards on this floor was a tomb. "You'll probably find some goodies over there, and then you can go back home to your boss with his money."
The players wandered north and found the tomb. While Octavia examined the runes and murals on the wall, K'rizzt and Márta scrounged up 101 SP in burial jewelry. Still not having gathered enough cash, the trio ignored the dwarves' warning about the plague and broke through the mycelium patch of wall with a crowbar. They were delighted to find gold and jewels inside. They were considerably less delighted when the sixteen dwarven corpses rose up and started moaning. The trio beat a hasty retreat out of the room, hacking down any zombies that came too close. As they stood outside in the tomb, using the hole in the wall as a chokepoint, they worried if this would be their last stand. After all, they were only three level one adventurers against a horde of thirteen zombies. But Octavia had an idea. She cast Grease on the floor while Márta set it on fire with a torch. Rather than go round by round of boring zombie flaming zombie combat, I ruled that a dungeon turn passed and that they were able to hack all the zombies to bits.
After looting the plague fortress, they ran out of the dungeon as fast as possible to return to town. Márta had received a nasty bite from one of the zombies and wasn't feeling too well. Fortunately, a quick trip to the temple of the Earth Mother was able to purge the disease from her system.
POSTGAME THOUGHTS
I'm happy with how this went. The players are just about to level up and they've already explored a lot of content that I missed when I played. And opening up the passage from the hypocaust closet to the underground lake should solve the issue we ran into last time where a certain chokepoint got blocked off. Everyone died and we were unable to progress or level up and the dungeon just kinda stalled out. I think this time will be different. If only because we have a consistent party of three rather than two. Also ghouls aren't as much of a death sentence as they were now that Begone FOEs can turn undead.
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