Shadowdark Live Play Session 2

Intro

Full disclosure, I killed 16 characters between the end of session 1 and the end of session 2. Originally I was going to just move on to the new characters, but after killing all the ones I rolled up, I just went back to the original four and played on from the end of session 1. So what you are reading is the version of the matrix where our original four don’t all die to an ochre slime in a dank corridor.

Killing those 16 characters was a blast, and even with the knowledge I acquired it was still a challenge to make it out of this gauntlet with any living characters. Cry of the Stingbat is 10/10, do recommend. I just wanted to be clear about just how many deaths I actually had playing it, and I had that many deaths because I had not fully embraced the OSR way of playing, but now I am locked in baby.

With that disclaimer, let’s get on to the story.

Shadowdark Season 1, Session 2

Pocketing the mirror, the halfling moves into the larger chamber and pauses a moment for his companions. Once everyone has assembled, he again darts off, finding another chest and bringing back 2 torches and a pole (rolling a 1, 3, 1 on a d4 according to the starting gear table). Passing the torches out, the others search the room and find a barricade at the western exit of the room and begin clearing a path.

The first round of clearing goes poorly, but in the second round the goblin and half-orc both find a weak spot and are able to quickly make a hole large enough to get through (rolling nat 20s). Walking through the caverns, with the half-orc in the lead, the party quickly becomes disoriented and finds they have arrived right back at the barricade. The goblin, taking the lead, walks right through the next cavern with no issue. Looking back at his party in amazement, he can see a fine mist and shouts to the party to throw him the rope so he can lead them out. The half-orc ties an iron spike to the rope and throws it, but it doesn’t reach the goblin. They spend another round trying again, and this time it connects (rolling with advantage).

Through the caverns of confusion, and avoiding any random encounters (kept rolling above a 1), they come to the foot of the steep ledge. It takes the half-orc 4 rounds to climb the ledges, and then he throws down the rope for his struggling companions. Even with the rope, it takes another 2 rounds for the rest of the party to make it.

Now keep in mind, since I am playing solo rules, instead of 4 hours I have a hard 40-round limit on everyone making it out. I think that adds even more difficulty to this adventure. So by now it’s round 21 and I am getting nervous.

The party proceeds to an intersection and, after rolling on the oracle, decides to go left. They find a long-dead prisoner chained to a wall, along with a scrap of paper that teaches them about the Sect of the Proboscis. They also find a ritual dagger in the room. The half-orc pockets the dagger with great interest, taking care to wrap it in the loose garments of the prisoner, as it seems to be covered in stingbat venom.

Backtracking, they arrive at a corridor of ochre jellies. By this point the ochre jellies are now more bodies than jelly. They recognize their fellow townspeople floating in them. An intelligence roll and an oracle roll enable the party to not only realize they have to use fire and can’t chop the jellies, but also notice the torch wall sconces and begin lighting them to push the jellies all the way back down the hallway until the jellies fully retreat into a lake of mud.

The party sees no way forward but to swim through the mud lake. To handle this room mechanically as a solo player but still keep myself in the moment, I rolled a d3 to pick whether the party swam to the northern chamber, the southern chamber, or continued straight ahead, and luckily I rolled a 5. Then, every round, for each character I rolled the required strength check and an oracle roll to see if they became lost in the lake. Back to the story.

The half-orc is the first to start treading into the mud, the rest of the party following close behind until they realize they can no longer reach the bottom and need to swim. The half-orc makes it through to the other side with little issue, but the goblin and the bookish halfling struggle for a few rounds before making it through. The party waits, costing several rounds, but their fourth member never emerges from the swamp. A screech rings out; the stingbats are starting to return to the cave. Grim-faced and without a spoken word, they decide to move on. (The halfling ranger rolled a 1 on his first swimming stat check.)

At round 29, the party enters the flowstone terrain. They can see the pink light at the end of the tunnel; sunrise is approaching and the pressure is on. Mechanically, this tunnel is a race to make DC 16 climb checks. The half-orc uses the rope and grappling hook and takes a round to secure a foothold with it. He climbs up first and then helps the remaining party members up.

I was frantically rolling these dice to make these checks and get this party out of the tunnel. Sweat beading on my forehead, the party scrambling up the shaft, having to rethrow the rope once, they made it out at the end of round 39.

Our party scrambles into the sunlight just as they hear the cries of the stingbats’ return.

Soon there is another sound, as a second group scrambles out of the opening behind them.

Three of them, filthy and shaking. The half-orc gets to his feet, and he knows one of them. A human. They walk toward each other and grasp forearms, hand to elbow, a grip with a hitch in the middle of it that would look like nothing at all to anyone watching.

“We are the only ones that made it out.”

Here is the magic I love. Both of those characters rolled cult initiate on the background table, and neither player-facing part of me had thought about what that meant until they were standing in the sunlight looking at each other. They were both down there the whole time. Had either one known, they would have gone in together and the whole night would have gone differently.

The other two are a human woman, an herbalist, and a dwarf who won’t say much about why he isn’t welcome wherever he came from. Greetings are exchanged fast and shallow, the way you do when the thing you just crawled out of is still screeching behind you. Six of them now.

Nobody wants to stand around at the mouth of that cave. They put it behind them with haste and push into the next hex, and being lost and half-blind with exhaustion they walk into the wrong one (rolled randomly). They make camp in daylight, sleeping through the sun with a watch set, which is exactly backwards from how they’d like to be living.

While they’re setting up, our original three tell the newcomers what they learned down there. The scrap of paper. The Sect of the Proboscis. A cult in their own town, devoted to the things that ate their neighbors. They decide, sitting in the dirt with their boots still wet with mud, that they’re going to find the leaders of it and drive them out.

What if the village elders are in it? They come up with a plan: get home, act normal, tell no one, regroup in the morning.

Then I rolled a 1.

A forest dragon comes through the camp. I asked the oracle whether it was aware of them and got a no, and I love that answer more than a yes. This thing is not hunting them. It is furious about something else entirely, somewhere else entirely, and their camp is simply in the way of it. Everyone rolls a dex save to get clear of a creature that never once looks down.

Five of them make it. The dwarf does not. He is under it and then he is part of the forest floor, and it’s gone through the trees before anyone can shout his name, which is fine, because nobody had learned it yet.

Another day’s travel gets them home without further trouble.

They split at the edge of town. Everyone to their own bed, a real night of rest for the first time in what feels like a week, and they’ll meet in the morning to decide what to do about the cult.

Except two of them don’t go home. The human and the half-orc walk a different way, to a different door, and report to leaders of their own.

Where we’re leaving it

That’s the session. They’re out of the gauntlet, which means they’re finally level 1, and I get to name them, roll their stats properly, and write down who they actually are. I’ll have all of that at the top of session 3. In terms of real game time I am about 5 hours in, I had a lot of back and forth with the rulebook and I did a few things wrong with combat I think, but otherwise loving the system and really looking forward to playing with real characters at level 1.

Five survivors, one plan, and two of them are already lying about it.