Adventures in a Doomed World: Session 2

 

Map of Eilobar

I'm playing Basic Fantasy RPG with a few supplements to turn it into a solo fantasy hexcrawl in the world of Eilobar, a doomed land entering its end times. I'm using the Level 0 Character Tumbler, Hexcrawl Aventures and also 47 Critical Hit Tables to Spice Up Your Game. Starting with level 0 characters I'm attempting to keep them alive long enough to level up from -100 to 1 XP and become actual heroes.

Introduction

After last time's abysmal failure I decided the goblins would have raided Laford again in revenge, killing or enslaving all the villagers there, so it's now basically a dungeon that a new party might come across one day.

Meanwhile the village of Keyham, about a week's walk North-East of Laford is suffering from attacks from the nearby Tunnels of Mothric, whose monsters have become more active of late, as the end times get underway.

This time I made twelve villagers to give them more of a chance. They were:

Anet, female human farmer

Conig, male human freed slave

Garma, female elf vintner

Ryani, male halfling vintner

Gerry, male human alchemist

Laura, female halfling sheep herder

Legali, male elf villager

Nainan, male dwarf mercenary

Rancis, male human night watchman

Rordan, male human trapper

Stosla, female human wizard's apprentice

Urim, male elf monastic initiate

I've now added a fun PDF from Drivethru RPG, 47 Critical Hit Tables to Spice Up Your Game, by Blackstone Entertainment. There are no rules for critical hits or misses, so I'm going to use a 20 on an attack roll as a hit and a 1 as a miss.

The Adventure

The Tunnels of Mothric are a dungeon rather than a cave network. Hopefully this should give us some more interesting rooms, traps etc. The tunnels are three days South-East of the village. The villagers put their savings together and found they could only afford one handaxe, so they gave it to Nainan the dwarf.

They travelled through a patch of wasteland, into a swamp and past some ruins of an old village that was destroyed when the monsters first started spilling out of the nearby tunnels. Then they found the entrance, a pack of eight wild dogs roaming around it. Rancis the night watchman had assumed the lead, and approached the dogs to see if they were hostile.

The dogs immediately went in for the kill, but the villagers were ready and got the initiative. Anet the farmer stabbed a dog with her pitchfork, killing it.

The dogs leapt at the villagers, aiming for their throats. One of them ripped out the throat of Rancis, the group's leader.

Anet stabbed a second dog to death.

A dog tore out the throat of Garma, one of the two vintners, then the same thing happened to Legali, elven weaver.

Anet killed a third dog! Laura the halfling sheep herder hit a dog in the head with her sling, killing it. The remaining dogs lost their nerve and fled the area.

The villagers picked up their fallen neighbours' gear and tended to Conig the former slave's wounds. Laura found three stones to use with her sling (I decided she could roll 1D4 per day while outside to find suitable stones to use as bullets).

They entered the dungeon. Generating an area of a dungeon in the Hexcrawl Adventures supplement is really fun. You roll a whole load of dice, and different numbers equal different features. The amount of that number you roll is the amount of that type of feature in the area. E.g. a 1 is an exit door leading to the next dungeon area. Rolling a 1 on your D4 but also on your D12 would mean there are two exits in this area. Rolling a maximum number on any die is a monster lair, and so on.

First they found a bunkroom. It had a chest in the middle of it surrounded by a blob of green slime. It slithered towards the party. Luckily it moved slowly so they all lit their torches and Stosla the wizard's apprentice cast her Shield spell, before they all moved in to attack it.

It was so slow they were able to hold their torches to it and burn it away easily. Anet gained a level, becoming a level 1 fighter. They found 10GP in the chest.

They found a second bunkroom opposite, which had nothing useful in it.

Next they found a kitchen that had flooded, making the floor slippery. A stirge jumped from a table and swooped in to attack. Rordan slashed it with his sword and it died. They found 25GP in the room.

Opening the door to an adjoining kitchen they found five goblins.

Urim whipped one with his scourge and Conig bruised another with his club. Anet pitchforked one in the face, killing it. Nainan shot one in the chest with his crossbow, killing it. Urim whipped his one in the head, killing it. Conig bashed his one again, braining it.

The last goblin wavered but decided to fight to the death. It hit the flat of its blade against Anet's arm, doing no damage.

Conig hit it weakly. Suddenly Gerry the elderly alchemist smashed its face in with his staff, killing it instantly.

They looted 42 silver pieces from the goblins, along with their shortswords.

Next they found a common room with some poor quality furniture inside. They continued exploring, finding two rooms with garbage pits side by side but empty of monsters. On their way to the final room of the area they saw two cobras slithering down the corridor.

Laura the halfling and Nainan the dwarf both loosed their missiles and missed. They stepped aside to let the others decide what to do. Since they were at a cross-junction in the corridor they spread out to let the snakes come to them.

The snakes could spit venom up to five feet, so they closed to that range and spat, missing the villagers.

The villagers realised if they waited for the snakes to come to them they'd very likely launch themselves through the air at whoever was in front, so Conig and Urim rushed at them. Conig bashed one with his club.

It then bit Conig, the venom instantly killing him (he only had 1HP left anyway). The other tried to bite Urim but missed.

Urim turned and ran back to the others, the snake lashign out at him but missing.

With the villagers all around the junction, the snakes crawled right into the middle of them and attacked. One missed Anet and flailed around on the floor (critical miss), while the other missed.

Rordan slashed one snake in half, then Stosla the wizard's apprentice clubbed the other, bruising it badly. Finally Anet deftly speared it through the head with her pitchfork. They picked up Conig's lucky rock from his body and opened the door to the final room of the area.

The door opened into what looked like an armoury of some kind, but it was filled with stirges flying around the room like mad! (Monster lair with 26 stirges!). There was no time to retreat so Anet tried to close the door again. As she did so a stirge darted down and ripped out her throat. The others prepared to fight the birds one by one as they came through the door.

A horrible bloody melee ensued. Laura was able to pick up Anet's pitchfork but then got killed a moment later. Rordan imapled the first stirge on his shortsword, killing it. They killed two more but not before they had lost Ryani and Nainan to the birds. Realising there was no way they could win, they all ran to the exit and attempted to slam the heavy door behind them as the corridor filled up with stirges.

Rordan was killed while closing it, but then Gerry managed to shut it tight.

The Tunnels of Mothric. The star indicates the armoury is a monster lair.

With only Urim (monk initiate), Gerry (alchemist) and Stosla (wizard's apprentice) left, they decided to head back to Keyham and try to recruit more friends if they were to have any hope of clearing out the Tunnels of Mothric.

They set off home, encountering only a travelling merchant on his way to Keyham. They didn't have any loot to sell since their dead friends were carrying it, but Urim did buy leather armour and a quarterstaff for himself.

Conclusion

Hmm, that last fight was absolutely insane. It came about by rolling a monster lair in the Hexcrawl Adventures dungeon generation and the fact that in the BFRPG rulebook a lair full of stirges has 3D12 of them. There isn't any kind of level scaling based on the players' character levels in the monster encounter tables, only harder monsters as you go down floors in the dungeon.

I think for the next session I'm going to have to change things quite drastically otherwise none of my villagers will survive long enough to reach level 1. Anet did but she died anyway, even with her extra hitpoints. One thing that makes it so hard is the monsters in BFRPG have HP based on their hit dice, so a 1 hit die stirge has a random amount between 1 and 8. The first one you fight could have 1 and die in one hit, and the next could be eight times as tough.

I might have a look into combat and stats in a different RPG and then overlay them on Basic Fantasy. I'm still having fun with this though, and I think once I've levelled around 4 characters to 1 they might have more of a chance, especially if I switch the systems around a bit.