P lunging inside the dark sewers, our five delvers were quickly forced back into the light above by a horde of fungus-covered cordyceps zombies. Wait! The wizard quest-giver said there were no undead haunting the sewers! Maybe some ghoulish corpse eaters, but no biggie there. All the party has to do is walk roughly twenty five yards or so to a storage room and get a little box of mysterious contents. Bring it back and get paid $500 apiece. Keep what you find in the room. This was suppose to be easy! The Oct. 18, 2015 session seemed to pass quickly. Some technical troubles kept us from starting until about 1:40 p.m. CDT, then after introductions and a short " class video ," we started actual game play at about 2 p.m. We ended just before 5 p.m. A list of Gorefest Dungeon characters and respective players: Archie playing Ilthmier Tasseldale, human Knight (251 points). Chris playing Legitimate Hobbes, human Holy Warrior (251 points) and Culain (250-point Ally). Brandon playing Rasgar, minotaur Barbarian (251 points). Valter playing Ulf, leprechaun Wizard (251 points). Luke playing Kritty, catfolk Swashbuckler (251 points). Petro, not present, and his characters Derne, wood elf Scout (251 points) and Stripes (250-point Ally). T his is actually the second time the players entered the sewer dungeon, but we retconned out the Oct. 11, 2015 session's hour of actual game play. Petro let us know well in advance that he wasn't able to make it to the table tonight, and we ended inside the dungeon in the first session rather than by returning to town—something I want to strongly avoid. The game is designed to be a "town-and-down" campaign. In the first session, basically, Petro's wood elf Scout, Derne, put an arrow in one of the zombie's brains for a whole 4 HP injury. Brandon rolled a critical miss and a "drop weapon" result, so his character, Rasgar the minotaur Barbarian, ended up flinging his halberd. So, the first session's game play wasn't all that eventful and no one was sorry to see it cleared off the record. Everyone earned a character point for participating, thus the 251-point totals beginning this session. O n paper at least, not a whole lot happened in this session. Rasgar charged forward immediately to absolutely no one's surprise and started hacking. He did work. Bodies hit the floor. Five of 'em. All headless. Perhaps more importantly, Rasgar revealed a greater threat than the fungi-covered zombie's slavering, rotten-toothed fangs: the pods growing on the walking corpses burst open releasing a cloud of spores. As Luke's Kritty the catfolk Swashbuckler (who claims he a "pirate captain") soon found out, that spore cloud burns the eyes and nostrils and causes a coughing fit. Coughing, the irritating condition from p. B428, gives a -3 to DX and -1 to IQ penalty, and the afflicted can't use Stealth. Ouch. Thankfully, Kritty has a 21 base skill with his cutlass, so a -3 against monsters that so far have not attempted active defenses isn't a real big deal. Worse, the PC's noticed another shambling horde of zombies to the south stumbling slowly forward. Roughly 40-80 zombies could be seen in the beam of lantern light. Many more could have hidden shrouded in darkness beyond its range. T hen, Valter decided to bring out the big guns. His character Ulf the leprechaun Wizard levitated closer and flung a Concussion missile spell at the center-most zombie. KA-BOOM! The thunderous sonic explosion rocked the tunnels. The zombies to the east—all of them—were stunned. Concussion, Magic , p. 26, my favorite missile spell, is an ultra-powerful attack. It does little physical damage—just 1d per 2 FP—but it explodes causing anyone within 10 yards to roll against HT-3 or be stunned! Wow! Trouble is, I forgot all the zombies were berserk, so they were indeed stunned. Had I remembered they were berserk, they would have been unaffected. However, I expected Ulf to cast a spell that would nullify most the zombies and predicted it would be Concussion. It's what I would have done and Ulf has used it before. I just forgot that the zombies would be unaffected due to having the viscous modifier to berserk ( Zombies , p. 58). Oh well! Like I say, it went down as I expected, but the zombies' real threat isn't by way of physical attack; it's the exploding spores, an always-on emanation. Concussion did nothing to stop those, so the zombies remained a (lethal?) blockade between the PC's and the storage room. It's metagaming , but the players also know their characters have rolled resistance twice against some type of attack. The first roll, no one has failed, so it isn't known what effects it will have. C hris' Holy Warrior Legitimate Hobbes, who worships an agricultural deity, has a barrow hound named Culain (pronounced "Coo-lane") for an ally. The ally is built per rules-as-written using the Hound template ( Allies , pp. 8-9) with Timber Wolf and Good ( Allies , p. 17) lenses. Here's a pic for reference: Culain is sapient, if only possessing a child's intellect. He can speak telepathically to Hobbes. His senses detected the sound of bats in the sewers and a heavy presence of corpse-eaters. Corpse-eaters are a standard racial template from Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level . They aren't undead, but they do share an affinity with walking corpses. Their Brotherhood of Ghouls racial perk makes them ignored by zombies and other similar undead. Luckily, there were no corpse-eaters in sight. T hough he didn't actually fight any zombies—not that fighting zombies was even important—Archie's Knight, Ilthmier (pronounced "Ill-th" like illness with a 'th'-meer) played an important role. He acts as the party's coordinator if not the outright leader. Having found out the spore clouds were potentially a serious threat, he decided the PC's would be wise to ascend back up into the daylight and find protection. He organized the withdraw. Too bad there weren't more Research rolls to go around in the quest-finding part of the pre-quest or the PC's might have known as much. Currently, only Ulf can make a research roll according to the rules in Dungeons . Rasgar had flown into berserk state, but Brandon made his roll to snap out of it after another couple one-shot kills. He throws four dice when rolling damage—five if he were converting dice + adds. One of the zombie's fungi-covered heads remained on the pick of his halberd. They decided it would be best to bring it with them back to town above. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with bringing a pathogen-spewing, spore infested, infectious (possibly autonomous) zombie head into the city streets during broad daylight . . . I t was a good session. The players did very well. My personal goal is to cut down my own table talk between turns to help speed the game along, so I'll try to do better next time. Game pacing is my responsibility entirely. The scenario wasn't designed to be, "Go down into dungeon and kill some zombies before returning," or even, "Hack your way through a drove of zombies, get the quest item, return." No, there was a lot more on the table. A whole lot more. For one, an ambush was meant to make the scenario actually a "rock and a hard place." The zombies were the hard place and the rock was the actual threat. So, that part didn't go as I planned and a lack of real-time was at fault. However, even had we taken turns quickly, we probably would have ended in the middle of a big fight rather than back at town. So, for that, I'm glad. Ending in town is important! It's not like all my planning is wasted, either. No, there won't be a concentrated horde of zombies next time, but the PC's already know there are a lot of them down there. They aren't going anywhere soon. This adventure and the next will probably take place in the same game-time day. Dungeon Fantasy isn't designed that way, though. It's balanced for a week or more between adventures. However, this is the dungeon's "first level," so maybe we can let that be the advantage to adventuring in the labyrinthine sewer system. There's whole lot down there to explore! It's a massive, 4200-pixel square map! Character point rewards will follow this post. Our next regularly-scheduled session is Oct. 25 at 1 p.m. CDT. Hope to see everyone there!
