Castle Redvald - Session 4 - With Apologies from the Carthographers' Guild
Took a little while but here's the fourth session of my 3LBB OD&D game. It doesn't really show much in this session but I'm back to using the rules as they are instead of my trimmed down "Underground Adventures" house rules document. Elfs, Dwarfs, Magic-Users etc. are back in.
After a quiet week, Wigric (Pizzaready) and Lest (Sotto) decided to head back into the dungeon, this time with Julienne (Ice Tea), Klondike (Carlos), a trio of dwarfs and four mercenaries from the White Lion company.
• Going north-west hoping to find the Church of the Broken God priests' camp, the party found a sword stuck in a stone slab at the end of a corridor. Lest tried pulling on it, which revealed the sword to be the tongue of a huge mimic passing as a dead-end in a corridor. As Wigric stuck the beast's mouth open with a 10' pole, quick-witted Julienne shot at the "sword" to try and free Lest but a bad miss had the shot end up in his throat. With little time to mourn their companion, the party pushed the mimic further away with pointy sticks and fire, then decided to backtrack and explore another area.
• A party of priests came out of the shadows, shambling and moaning, with their eyes red and pale bodies, and threatened the party with the voice of the Horned Ones they slaughtered a while ago.
The battle went very well, with some injuries on the party's side but no casualties. One of the priests came to his sense again somehow and agreed to guide the party to his camp, and warned them of a room he had little memories of, which had surely cursed him and his comrades.
• After finding the camp, the party went north and found a strange metal box hanging from a chain going up a large chimney, and spent some time trying to disarm the potential trap they figured it to be, until at some point a blue goblin with a concerned look stepped out of a hatch inside the box to ask them what they were doing to his elevator, and if they were planning to go up or just mess around.
That's it.
Not a lot happened this session, because most of it was spent trying to understand each others, map-wise. Forking paths and a few misunderstanding in distances is enough to make mapping hellish for everyone involved, as it turns out. In areas that have more space between halls and less room density, light bugs in the players' maps aren't a big deal, but here it became obvious to them there were some issues in the maps, so we had to spend a lot of time re-tracing our steps and figuring out where it was that our maps conflicted.
I had to cheat and share some bits of my maps - and managed to mess these up too.
The current map, with corrections and additions due to the priest's help with navigating the area.
A Possible Solution
I'm going to try and use Roll20 to facilitate sharing bits of my map at times - I won't be doing the whole "go around the dungeon on a grid" thing because I still want players to do their own maps, but right now sharing a picture like the one above takes too much time: I need to re-draw bits of my map, then take a pic with my old phone, then plug it on my computer, then upload the thing on Discord.
Another Solution although incidental to the issue we had here is that I'm growing out of my super-old-school maps itch already, finding myself more interested in drawing more condensed maps with a more high concept, narrow-focus and strong theme (at least one of these buzzwords should accurately represent what I mea). So there's that too, which should help speed up the mapping process in the future.
After a quiet week, Wigric (Pizzaready) and Lest (Sotto) decided to head back into the dungeon, this time with Julienne (Ice Tea), Klondike (Carlos), a trio of dwarfs and four mercenaries from the White Lion company.
• Going north-west hoping to find the Church of the Broken God priests' camp, the party found a sword stuck in a stone slab at the end of a corridor. Lest tried pulling on it, which revealed the sword to be the tongue of a huge mimic passing as a dead-end in a corridor. As Wigric stuck the beast's mouth open with a 10' pole, quick-witted Julienne shot at the "sword" to try and free Lest but a bad miss had the shot end up in his throat. With little time to mourn their companion, the party pushed the mimic further away with pointy sticks and fire, then decided to backtrack and explore another area.
• A party of priests came out of the shadows, shambling and moaning, with their eyes red and pale bodies, and threatened the party with the voice of the Horned Ones they slaughtered a while ago.
The battle went very well, with some injuries on the party's side but no casualties. One of the priests came to his sense again somehow and agreed to guide the party to his camp, and warned them of a room he had little memories of, which had surely cursed him and his comrades.
• After finding the camp, the party went north and found a strange metal box hanging from a chain going up a large chimney, and spent some time trying to disarm the potential trap they figured it to be, until at some point a blue goblin with a concerned look stepped out of a hatch inside the box to ask them what they were doing to his elevator, and if they were planning to go up or just mess around.
That's it.
Not a lot happened this session, because most of it was spent trying to understand each others, map-wise. Forking paths and a few misunderstanding in distances is enough to make mapping hellish for everyone involved, as it turns out. In areas that have more space between halls and less room density, light bugs in the players' maps aren't a big deal, but here it became obvious to them there were some issues in the maps, so we had to spend a lot of time re-tracing our steps and figuring out where it was that our maps conflicted.
A Possible Solution
I'm going to try and use Roll20 to facilitate sharing bits of my map at times - I won't be doing the whole "go around the dungeon on a grid" thing because I still want players to do their own maps, but right now sharing a picture like the one above takes too much time: I need to re-draw bits of my map, then take a pic with my old phone, then plug it on my computer, then upload the thing on Discord.
Another Solution although incidental to the issue we had here is that I'm growing out of my super-old-school maps itch already, finding myself more interested in drawing more condensed maps with a more high concept, narrow-focus and strong theme (at least one of these buzzwords should accurately represent what I mea). So there's that too, which should help speed up the mapping process in the future.
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