I enjoyed doing the In Medias Res open again for a change of pace. The intial battle with the Legion of the Damned was longer than I expected it to be. But, the fights inside the dungeon were all pretty fast. That's the thing about an old-school dungeon, you can get a surprisingly large number of battles in one session.
Original D&D, AD&D1e, AD&D2e, and Basic/Expert style D&D (all of which are essentially the same game) all have that particular virtue in common. It starts to slow down in the 3e era and afterwards.
Let's see we had: 3 fights vs. Legion of the Damned, 1 vs. Undead Ogres, 1 vs. Ochre Jelly, 1 vs. tiny spiders, 1 vs. Goblins, 1 vs. Yellow Mold and 1 vs. the Spirit of Holy Aurelius. 9 fights in one night. That's pretty good. If we had skipped the Legion outside, we probably would have had a lot more.
I guess to be fair, the dungeon was originally designed for level 2-3 characters, and we had 3-5, but it's still pretty close. If Peaches hadn't swiped those Keogtam's ointment last game, the body count would have been much, much higher, due to poison.
I must say that Marlon's Kuman really deserved to die in the Yellow Mold room. To keep poking the hangings after 2-3 guys were poisoned was bad enough, but to go back and keep doing it even after he was poisoned himself was really pretty boneheaded.
Speaking of boneheaded, I am really, really going to enjoy clubbing Mallak, Peaches, Badaxe and Kuman over the head, over and over and over and over again for desecrating the tomb of Holy Aurelius and attacking his manifested spirit (especially since they did it in front of a crapload of witnesses who are members of the Church of Bor to one degree or another).
Yeah, I entirely expect Brother Pax to skip town as soon as we get off the island. I'm pretty sure we've burned up any good will that we had, or will have for quite a while, in this episode. Going to be difficult to find dedicated healers for awhile, I'd wager. What's sad is that I was going to ask a few more questions of Brother Pax about the grave, before deciding about opening or not, when Mallak just went ahead and did it. I did make a feeble attempt at covering it back up after the battle.
ReplyDelete