Into the Tomb of the Serpent Kings - Part 1
I'm starting a gaming group at my university to get some IRL games and get more people into adventure games! Today we managed a small party of two players, plus yours truly. I started a somewhat classic fantasy adventure in a setting I'm tentatively calling YALBEG! - you are likely to be eaten by a grue!
I'm using Electric Bastionland/Into the Odd for rules, with some fantasy themed starter packs.
Characters
• Bobbydick is a cunning Monster Hunter, accompanied by Kristoff, his acolyte.
• Daffy is a fearless (but not suicidally so) Duck Barbarian, with the cowardly Donald as his henchman.
What Happened
• After doing character generation and briefly explaining some game concepts, we started off with a short intro: the PCs established how they knew each other (fought and captured a witch together), and I explained how the got drunk at a tavern to celebrate their victory, got hired by a mysterious Dame to steal an Idol from the Tomb of the Serpent Kings (for 1,000 gold + anything they can steal from there). They were given a map and decided to leave in the middle of the night while drunk.
• Players started off waking up hungover in a bear's cave (bear was asleep), got their bearings and quietly exited the cave. There they realized they couldn't find the map. Daffy went back inside and found the map underneath the bear, which he managed to crawl under without waking it up.
• Looking at the damaged and somewhat graffiti'd map, they realized they had gone the wrong way in their drunken stupor and walked all day to the tomb. It was hidden under a hill, but some careful observation and excavation allowed the party inside.
• Exploring the entrance tunnel, the party uncovered two pairs of funerary chambers. In the first one, Bobbydick found an amulet attached to a stone statue of a snake-headed warrior, ripped it off its fingers, breaking the hollow statue and releasing a powerful soporific gas. Almost everyone failed their saves, though luckily Donald made it (he stuck outside the room out of cowardice), and managed to wake up the others after about an hour.
• The room opposite that first one mirrored the first, so Daffy held his breath and ripped out another amulet and avoided the gas. The next two rooms were fancier, so they decided to not tempt fate.
• At the end of the corridor was a massive stone slab with a stone bar holding it closed. The group quickly noticed something was amiss, and Bobbydick eventually figured out a way to prevent a trap from triggering as the crew lifted the bar and got to safety. Releasing the trap, a massive stone hammer broke the slab and let them into the next room.
• A large diamond-shaped room with three painted coffins of sleeping snake warriors. Daffy cracked the middle one open, and the skeletons (with snake heads) inside immediately came to life and tried to murder the party. Kristoff destroyed one of the skeletons, and Daffy went down from a solid hit by the larger undead warrior. And we had class so we stopped there and rushed back to uni.
Some Thoughts
• Real life makes scheduling a bit more complicated - out of five people we only got two players free for the first session. Hopefully everyone gets to play over the semester.
• The players quickly figured out "how" to play since it's almost all diegesis-focused (describe stuff, ask questions, done, you know how to play), and were pretty clever in how to explore the dungeon and its tricks. Overall, pretty fun if short (barely two hours!) session.
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