The Editioning Week Four, OD&D

The Woes of Sorrowfield, Session Three

The hex-crawl continues through the Barrenwood. The PCs have been doing their best in difficult circumstances. Sorrowfield is a miserable place right now. There have been some sort of magical ballistics going off over town and country, undead and chimerae stalk the land and the bloody rain hasn’t stopped in weeks. Perhaps it was the constant and growing danger around them that prompted the adventurers to finally question the motives of the pixies they’d been following for a few hours through the forest.

The pixies, you see, had been trying to get them to the lake in the northwest part of the woods. Once they reached it, however, they could see a soft, violet glow from the waters. It matched the glow from the crystals they had discovered throughout the forest so far. The pixies hovered above the lake and asked them to dive in, claiming the source of the corruption was submerged beneath the unsettled waters. The PCs thought better of it despite the pixies’ mocking and cajoling. They wanted to circumnavigate the lake to see what sort of traps the mischievous little fae had in store for them, but that proved difficult. To the east, the river emerged from the lake’s waters, and there were no convenient trees to chop down to act as a bridge this time. To the northwest, they found a vast patch of crystalline briars. Since the briars covered the entire hex, they eventually decided to go one hex further around to the west, avoiding it entirely. This forced them into a a hex that was particularly confusing, with lots of entangling plants that tried to trip them. I asked them to roll a d6 to see if they got lost. They avoided rolling a 1 so they were able to press on in their desired direction.

All of the above; the pixies, the briars, the hex of confusion, all came from encounter table rolls. You can see that table on my last OD&D post here. They have all come together to make some interesting challenges and have forced the PCs to explore further than they might otherwise have. I’m fairly satisfied with most entries on the table. I feel like there’s a good mix of combat and non-combat encounters that require a good variety of solutions, skills and ingenuity to deal with. But there were two entries I really hoped they would roll up. Lucky me, those were their next two rolls!

The very next hex they entered, they rolled an 8, so they came across the Hermit’s Shack. They knew from rumours gathered in town, that there was a Hermit out in the woods somewhere, so it wasn’t a big surprise. They approached politely and Breandan welcomed them in, offering them tea and “biscuits.” I had a great time playing this guy. After a couple of sessions of mainly exploration and combat, it was refreshing to have some solid role-play. He was eccentric but friendly enough. He explained that he had run into the other group of adventurers who had been sent from the town of East Barrens. They had come across his shack on the way back from the ruined wizard’s tower on the coast to the west. They explained to him that they had been rebuffed in their attempts to delve into the dungeon beneath the ruins. Wave after wave of undead appeared as if by magic on the first level below. There was no way through… These adventurers had moved on after a restful visit, turning back towards the town.

Breandan also had a quest for the adventurers. He wanted them to hunt down and slay the carnivorous crystal elk that had been terrorising him of late. He wanted to travel up along the river to the north to see if he could escape this crystalline corruption, but every time he attempted the journey, the elk chased him back home. He promised the PCs a valuable reward if they would do this for them. They readily agreed and, after resting up in his cabin for a few hours, they set off to do just that.

Now, I considered just having the elk itself as the encounter in the next hex, but I decided, in the end, to stick to my own rules. I got them to roll on the encounter table again. This time they rolled a 6. The halfling heard them before she saw them, a shambling, groaning group of partly crystallised undead amongst the trees ahead. She tried moving silently through the woods to flank them and get a better look, but she failed badly, and got slammed to the floor by a zombie instead. This encounter was really over before it began, even though the zombies won the initiative roll. They couldn’t hit any of the other PCs, and then Tadhg, the cleric, now on Village Priest level (level 3) stepped in. A Village Priest can ably and automatically turn zombies, just have to roll 2d6 to figure out how many are affected. Well, Tadhg turned all four of them. But as he did so, the party got a good look at the zombies, two humans, a dwarf and a halfling, the exact make-up of the other band of adventurers. Now, this encounter on the table also involved the reward of an adventuring diary, which the PCs would have gotten if they had a chance to loot them. Since they sent them running instead, I decided to bring the elk into play. As the dwarven zombie was scarpering, the monstrous crystal antlers of the carnivorous elk emerged from between the trees, skewering him and sending him flying through the air. And suddenly, they were back in combat.

I like the “per-side” round by round initiative roll of OD&D. I like that it utilises a simple d6. I even like that, if both sides rolls are equal, then everything happens simultaneously. All of this adds a bit more randomness to the proceedings and keeps it interesting. Especially in this system where each combat round equals a full minute, you can imagine the ebb and flow of combat evolving constantly, with the momentum swinging one way for a time, and reversing quickly and unexpectedly when the enemy spots a weakness or exploits their opponents’ mistakes.

This was the strongest monster they had faced yet but I was only reminded of the primacy of action economy in D&D. It applies as much in this version as it does in 5E. One combatant against six is not an equal fight, no matter how many hit dice that one enemy has, unless they’ve also got six attacks per round. So, of course, they made relatively short work of it, and somehow, managed to avoid any further damage as well. What these two fights combined really showed, though, was the full range of combat abilities in the group. We had turning undead and healing magic, we had magic missiles and invisibility, and, as well as that we had backstabs and the Fighting Man even got in a mighty blow or two.

After they had dealt with the elk, they investigated the body of the dwarven zombie. Finding a diary on it, they were able to confirm that the corpse used to be Ferris, the son of the town’s blacksmith and stonemason. The PCs had been asked to keep an eye out for him by his mother so finding him like this was a poignant moment. His diary described his journey to the old wizard’s tower, the hidden entrance to the underground dungeon and the desperate fight with the hordes of undead in the basement. They had been forced to retreat, as Breandan had said earlier.

With that, they took the head of the elk and the body of Ferris back to Brendan’s place. They asked if he would return the body to his parents in town but he refused, conceding instead that they could bury him there on his land. They did so and held an impromptu funeral for the boy. It was a touching scene. That done, they received their reward from the hermit and rested up again that night before setting out for the wizard’s tower the next morning.

I just want to share with you the hex map as it looks now. The players, totally unbidden, have been filling it in with the things they’ve encountered on their way through the Barrenwood on the Roll20 map. I love this!

Conclusion

We had a couple more level ups following that session so some of the band are now level 4! I will be honest, I had not totally foreseen the speed they would be levelling at. Still, it was my decision to make levelling as easy as possible. For instance, I am allowing level-ups at the ends of each session, rather than the ends of adventures and I am handing out plenty of gold and treasure (1GP + 1XP in this edition), as well as bonus xp for completing quests and clever solutions to problems. So, I’m actually quite happy with the situation.

What it does mean though, is that I will have to upgrade some of the encounters I had planned for the dungeon itself. Since I don’t have the whole thing prepared yet and I’m not writing up entire stat blocks for encountered monsters anyway, it’s really no more work in prep than I was going to have anyway. I plucked that elk out of the Monsters & Treasure book’s list of monster stats at the last minute. It was a just a re-skinned unicorn. I love being able to do this quickly and easily when I don’t feel beholden to the 1000 entries in various monster books to choose from. I would often find myself in decision paralysis when presented with all the monsters available in official products for 5E, unable to find the exact right one for a given encounter, despite the sheer number of them. I don’t have that problem here at all since all the monsters are just a collection of hit dice and ACs with maybe a special feature to set them apart. It’s very easy to imagine that line of stats as representing any monster at all, or to customise them as you see fit.

Anyway, that’s it for the report on Session Three. It might be a few weeks before there’s another one, what with various IRL happenings. But I’ll be back next week, probably with a post on my current UVG exploits utilising the Troika adventure, The Hand of God. See you then, dear reader.