Caverns of Thracia - Delve 9
Break's over, we're back in Thracia baybeeee.
Players & Characters
Referee - Sully
Arete, Human Thief - laumry
Bomb, Halfling Fighter - Me!
Ebane, Human Bard - Tor
Parthenios, Human Wizard - OddCore
Strabon, Human Fighter - Kut/wil
Epicaste, Human Fighter - NPC companion
Events
From the journal of Bomb.
Back down the old road we go. Our motley crew at the cavern entrance hadn't had any trouble while we were away, a few cultists scurrying around in the jungle but nowt else. Ebane tried rousing them with a stirring speech but it fell flat among them. I thought it was alright, he's good with words, him.
The cultists had been busy shit-shovelling in the lower chamber. Nary a speck of guano to be seen, or those damned bats. The broom-pushers had hard words for Parthenios, that wizard who checked out from the cult last time and tagged along with us, but Strabon talked them down. We went east and found a couple of cult guards waiting outside the Gates of Death. Apparently the cult have been sending parties down into the darkness and are shocked they haven't come back. I'm no genius but I think I know what's happened to them. Arete and Parthenios looked the passage over - the wizard went down a bit and came back, he could hear us calling, and Arete shot a crossbow bolt down trailing some rope. It stuck into something while we pulled it back, maybe 30 feet or so down the way.
Screwing about over, we went north and almost made it to the stairs down when a bunch of half-starved, whip-scarred ragged types came hollering up them, screaming they were being chased by beastmen. We let the slaves pass and followed them, raising all hell to get the cultists to stall the beastman mob which followed. We passed by the entrance and got some of the mercenaries to take the escapees to the Roost, then went to the chasm where a cult priest was throwing corpses down. We scaled down on a rope to find another priest and a bunch of skeletons holding the line against the beastmen at the temple - a bunch of them had broken through after the slaves so we had a chance to counterattack.
Me, Strabon, and Epicaste led the van and the others followed. Parthenios uttered some incantation and lulled their archers to sleep while Epicaste dealt a big dog-headed one a blow so hard it and its mate ran to the teleporter and fled. Guess she's got a lot to deal with having been on ice for the last thousand years or so. The skeletons dealt with the sleeping gnolls and I toppled the last big one with a blow from my axe. The skeletons moved to guard the teleporter and cut off access to the fort to the south, where one 'Captain Synder' and a gaggle of beastmen were holed up. The fort looked like an old Thracian building, purpose built. We left the skeletons to their vigil.
Taking a look around the temple, Arete found a hidden door round the back. Inside we entered a chamber full of old Thracian supplies, including some weapons from 'Wing Tu'. Nothing magical, but we gathered parts for some kind of huge crossbow weapon, some more Thracian plate, a damn fine sword, something called a nunchaku (looks like a grain flail if you ask me), and some pointy star things. The big fun came with these 'rockets', apparently you light 'em on fire and they shoot off like a dragon's breath!
There were some more stairs down, but we decided to head back with what we'd nabbed and plan our next move.
Thoughts
This was a solid return after the campaign's mini break. We ended up finding a bunch of cool stuff, meaningfully changing the state in the dungeon - the cult are now in control of level 1 and ascendant on level 2 - and uncovered more secrets.
I raised a comment in the campaign's feedback channel that the first part of the session felt unfocused - we'd settled on exploring an area of level 2 as our main objective but got sidetracked looking at the Gates of Death, an area we'd already explored and investigated. Given that we only have 2 hours/session this ate into quite a lot of time for further exploration. The session was still very fun, but I felt a little frustrated that we deviated so heavily from our plan. I made a distinction between the deviation caused by Sully's random encounter (the gnoll incursion chasing escaped slaves) which forced us to react and acted as an interesting emergent situation for us to deal with, and us effectively dawdling for 45mins and not really accomplishing much.
I proposed electing a Caller each session to try and keep us on track with our objectives, basically have a player with an official capacity to check in and get feedback from the other members to ensure we're all good with the current course of action, and to act as a tie-breaker. Sully and the other players agreed that it sounded like a good idea, so we'll be trying it out this coming Monday. I've had great success with Callers in other games, so I think this will genuinely help.
On a different note, I used a Luck token for the first time this week to reroll an attack and came to the conclusion that I really don't like metacurrencies in TTRPGs - mostly because I forget about them. Shadowdark as a whole is fine - parts of it really irk me, on the whole it's quite simple and stays out of the way, and Sully has said it's made the whole thing largely a breeze to Referee, so on the whole it's doing an admirable job for the campaign so far.
Really looking forward to playing more, it's good being back in the caves!