DM Chronicles: Session 11, Foray into the Well of Demons, part 2

See part 1 here.

With all that shared narrative and roleplaying out of the way (just kidding…mostly), the players were ready to start exploring the Well of Demons.

I must say that I really like this part of the adventure.  It was the first one that reads like a true dungeon crawl. It’s made up of several sections with varied encounters and challenges.  During prep, I had read and prepared Minis and drawn battlemaps for the 4 most likely encounters.

The PC’s followed their map and got deeper into the labyrinth.  They came up to a very large square room with pillars and a Well.  As soon as they entered, some minotaur masks on the pillars animated and welcomed the party as pilgrim of Baphomet, the Demon lord of minotaurs and then talked about some sort of test…

…Which the party kinda didn’t hear because at that time a bunch of humoungous tentacles covered with fanged mouths (New Monster) burst out of the floor tiles and attacked the PCs.  It grabbed one of the PCs on it’s surprise attack.  Then a trio of opportunistic monsters moved in on the party.  A pair of Chokers (long armed climbing monsters that… well choke their prey) and a ghoul attacked at the same time.

The encounter was well designed.  The PCs could have gotten in trouble, with all monsters having controller elements this could have degenerated with most of the party immobilized and being choked/eaten/melted by all 4 monsters.

However it wasn’t to be so because I systematically failed to roll anything over 10 for the whole fight.  In fact, that trend was maintained all night long, to a point that even my players were making comments about how unlucky I was.  I didn’t mind because I strongly believe that players need such ‘everything went well for us’ encounters once in a while to top their ‘feel good’ tanks…

I hope they enjoyed it because there’s harsh stuff coming in the next sessions for them.

The fight lasted about 30 minutes or so, and the PCs were ready to explore the dungeon further.  They managed to recall the Masks’ full message which invited worshipers of Baphomet to a series of test to gain the Demon Lord’s boon.

The room had 2 other exits, they chose the one to the left and arrived in a Gnoll barrack!  Ensued a fight against 4 Hyenas and 3 gnolls in cramped quarters.  Once again players shredded the monsters easily and the fight was completed in less than an hour.  A gnoll archer fled, likely to another gnoll-held area of the dungeon.

The PCs rested a few minutes, collected their extra action point for hitting a milestone and forged on deeper in the dungeon.

They reached a long corridor with 2 sets of double doors on the right and one, much further, on the left.

When they opened the first set of double doors, they saw a group of Hyenas running around a chained Dire Boar trapped in a pen. At that point I somehow jumped the gun and mentioned a group of gnoll archers waiting at the other end of the room (near the second set of double doors).  Not wanting to face both hyenas and a firing squad at the same time, the party returned to the corridor, closed the door and went for the second entrance to the room.

So the party entered the room from the opposite end, catching a bunch of gnoll archers jumping over a wall made of bales of Hay, while the hyenas were jumping over said wall to attack the PCs.

The fight went fast, some PCs got bloodied while the DM continued playing atrociously bad rolls (and I was rolling behind a screen for once!)

Then followed a skill challenge to try to calm the Dire Boar.  The poor animal had been harassed by the Hyenas while the 3 gnolls archer were using it as target practice.  The challenge featured only 2 primary skills and was very short of details.  The PCs failed it and decided to let the boar calm down on its own before trying to calm it.

Earlier in the evening, Franky’s PC had asked the old dwarven trader for a piece of equipment the animal was familiar with in order to let it recognize the party as friendly.   I gave a +2 bonus to the skill roll used with the object.  In hindsight, I should have made this into an automatic skill roll success to reward Franky’s for thinking about this.

Hell, I should have made the whole challenge an automatic success just to motivate players to do more stuff like that.

Double hell, I’m going to retcon that scene into a success and tell Franky it was because his idea was worth being properly rewarded.

We stopped the game at this point.  Players were satisfied and seemed to have enjoyed themselves.

Lessons Learned

• When faced with a Skill challenge, take the time to properly reward good playing and creative ideas.  Don’t hesitate to give free successes.
• No matter how well designed an encounter is, an unlucky dice streak can trash it either way.
• If you are going to give narrative control to players but want to maintain some control, you need to set the rules in advance and not change them as you go..

Thanks for reading!