Adventures in a Doomed World: Session 19

Four ghouls in the wasteland. Image by Midjourney.

I'm playing a mashup of Scarlet Heroes and 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. The characters started as level 0 peasants and have since levelled up to become heroes.

Introduction

The heroes have spent three days resting in Keyham after wiping out a second goblin tribe. They must now continue clearing the surroundings of monsters.

The Adventure

After a few days' rest Stilda, Cyna, Helia and Bryne set off to the east. This area is part of the wasteland where they met the ragged strangers living in a cave. Unfortunately it's quite a large area of useless land.

"How did this place end up like this anyway?" Asks Cyna.

"The local wisdom is it was a huge battleground during the Second Scourge." Bryne says. "It was blasted with foul magic and the land never recovered. Nothing can grow here now and the only creatures that survive here and strange and tough. Not even orcs can find food here."

They begin searching the rocky landscape for signs of monsters and soon enough they find some humanoid tracks. They follow them to a rock formation where they can see four ghouls sheltering under an overhang. Since the heroes only have limited experience with adventuring I'm going to give them each a check (Simple: DC9) to see if they know that ghouls can paralyse with their claws and bite. Bryne will use her Lore trait.

Success!

Bryne warns the others and they attempt to keep their distance from the surprisingly fast moving undead. Helia manages to drop one of the ghouls before they get into close combat range, but the monsters go berserk when they reach Stilda and Cyna, both clawing and biting them at the same time. Luckily they manage to overcome the paralysis normally caused though. (The ghouls get three attacks per round: two claws and one bite, both with an attack bonus of 2).

Helia shoots a ghoul and the arrow goes right through its head but it carries on fighting. This would have been a critical hit had it not been undead. Bryne shoots it right afterward, killing it. Stilda fights back against her ghoul, stabbing and killing it with her sword.

The last remaining ghoul has no working brain to tell it to flee so it fights on, scratching Cyna and again failing to paralyse her, however it is quickly blasted by a magic missile from Bryne which burns a hole through its torso, putting it down. The party gains 400XP plus an extra hundred for clearing this hex. In the ghouls' lair they find 10 gold pieces, a bronze bracelet, a copper belly chain and a gold plated armlet adorned with amber. Not a bad haul.

Helia reaches level 3! She gains 2HP bringing her max to 8, 0.5 attack bonus bringing it to +2 and 1 point in her Adventuring Thief trait. She can now use her fray die against creatures with 3HD or lower.

They arrive back in Keyham that evening and turn in for the night, paying one silver piece to stable each horse as usual. The next morning they sell the jewellery at the market for 87.40GP and then discuss their next move. There's an unexplored area to the northwest, a forest to the northeast and Vathmang Temple in the hills to the west. Cyna suggests that since the temple used to be occupied by death cultists they might find undead there, possibly more powerful than the ghouls they just faced. If they could find a priest to help them clear it, that would make things much easier.

There's no temple to any of the Three in Keyham since the villagers have always been quite isolated and cut off from religion (which is probably how the death cult of Vamang sprung up), so they'd need to either travel west to the larger settlement of Seethorpe or ask around to see if anyone knows of one in a nearby village. They decide to go to the forest to the northeast for now.

The journey to the forest is uneventful but when they arrive they sit down for a rest and a flock of birds swoop down on the horses and steal three days' worth of rations from the saddlebags. They begin searching for signs of monster activity. They find tracks that look similar to the ones they found near the cave of the ragged strangers in the wasteland. Bryne is immediately suspicious. They follow the tracks to two large boulders leaning on each other. Between them is a hole in the forest floor, and a huge pack of overgrown rats starts swarming out from it.

They have to act quickly before they are engulfed. Helia shoots one dead and Bryne casts Sleep, knocking out ten of them. Two more flee at the sight of this but the others swarm the heroes. One bites Stilda. Unknown to her, she passes a constitution check to resist a nasty disease.

Roaring in rage, Stilda slashes out in all directions, killing three rats in less than two seconds. Cyna swings at one but misses, and Bryne fires a magic missile at another which blows it into a pile of gore and bones. Finally Helia shoots the last rat that's still awake, and they all take turns stabbing the sleeping ones until none are left alive. They receive 180XP but the rats had no treasure in their lair as one would expect.

It took a while to trudge through the dense forest so the party makes camp for the night. When they arrive home the next day they collect 50GP for clearing out the wasteland and the forest. Tomorrow they'll discover what lies to the northwest of the village.