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Champion

Registered: 03-2017
Posts: 26
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Questicus' Dungeon Journal


Hey everyone. Despite it looking so quiet around here nowadays (When I first joined there seemed to be a lot more traffic.) I felt like making a note of my adventures in the dungeon.

My friend and I have gotten back into the game recently, and although we have played a lot of custom content in the past (years back), we wanted a more vanilla feel this time around.

We started a few weeks ago but I can still remember a lot of things about the first few sections. First, here are our ground rules, as not everything is 100% vanilla.

House rules

- Warriors all get 500 gold and can stock up in a village before their first dungeon.

We like doing this just to give our novices a little more survivability (hah! doesn't always work...) and we think it makes some sense that adventurers would at the very least have some provisions, bandages etc before risking their lives.

-Warriors start off with one 1D6 healing potion each.

Same as above, a little more survival, DL 1 as I am sure most can attest to can be harder than later dungeons...

-Monsters are placed in adjacent board sections if possible, or at the furthest dungeon gate/entrance unless they successfully ambush.

My friend and I never liked always being stuck in corners or in the same positions when monsters swarmed around us and never bought it when a minotaur/giant/dragon managed to just pop out on us.

-Monster Overflow allowed

In the base game, if you cannot place a monster on the board (same or adjacent board section) they are ignored (If I recall.), however we felt this was a bit odd. So instead, we make a list of outstanding monsters and add them as space becomes available.
This is the same for when we have more monsters incoming, but not enough models to represent them. (We use stand-ins for almost every monster in the game, as we only have the miniatures from the WHQ box.)

-Fully stocked Towns/Cities.

We just never liked the stock mechanic, it felt fiddly and we thought a city should at least have one of each item. We still roll for stock in villages but when in a city, we always buy what we need/want.

-We use Christopher Taylor's Treasure chart;

http://wquest.free.fr/rules/rul_109.htm

Other than that I think we play mostly vanilla.

There are two of us, my friend plays the Elf and Barbarian. He never plays the wizard (Too fiddly he says, too much to keep track of.)

Thankfully I enjoy playing the Wizard, so he's my main and the Dwarf makes for a great tank.

First session


The infamy of this first section makes it easy to remember, not just because it was the first we had done in a long while but because of how short and violent it was.

The four warriors enter the dungeon, Hovarth the Wizard, Jungi the Dwarf, Tulkus the Barbarian and Wilf Claw the Elf. They stand in a room, taking up a formation with the wizard/elf in the back two corners of the room, with the Dwarf/Barbarian in the middle and a square in front and then pulled an event...

A cave in! Now...we all shake our heads in fear, thinking we were going to be crushed on the first round (if only, it would have spared us further suffering) but we read the RP book about how it cannot occur on the initial room.

So we roll again on the RP events table. Its a dead barbarian, with an interesting looking backpack. Either through some ironic twist of fate or because he wants to be the first to search his kin the Barbarian is chosen to check.

A trap! A spear flies out of the wall and nearly kills him! Reducing his already low BL 1 wound total to a mere few points!

Course, that's just the event for the room. We had yet to roll power, so we roll power and...its a one...you can probably see where this is going.

But what do we roll? Just 65: three minotaur's. (rolled 3 of them on a D3)

Lovely. I think now is it a good time to mention what spells the Wizard had, from the selection of spell cards the old conjurer pulled perhaps the worst selection; Fireball, Iron Skin and Life Force. It was great playing a Wizard with such a balanced selection of casting costs to work with...😪

So anyway, we fought through the turn, doing our best to try and survive the Minotaurs. There was two Minotaurs on Tulkus the Barbarian and one on Jungi (Dwarf), and to our credit we managed to survive a round, dealing several wounds and taking some in return (glad we picked up some bandages in the pre-dungeon village trip).

However, the next power roll came along and...another one! Honestly...

And we get...64, Centaurs 😮 three of them come galloping into the room and start unloading arrows at us.

The Wizard seemed to be an easy target for one of them, the shot nearly putting him down (The cantankerous soul let out a long moan and didn't shut up about it...which I enjoyed playing out 😂)

Needless to say, we didn't last long, even with our generous supplies and potions, the Wizard gets off one cast of Life Force in a desperate attempt to get some healing off the front line fighting the monsters but everyone misses or scores low damage.

I think at some point we roll giant rats, maybe a few rounds later. Maybe we managed to tackle one or two minotaurs between us but soon enough the party sees it's surely dead.

We all try and escape the dungeon by rolling on the table at the back of the adventure book, the Dwarf gets lost in the dark, the Wizard trips in the first door-way and gets clubbed to death by minotaurs and the Barbarian suffers wounds on his way out, enough to put him down for good.

The Elf meanwhile, Wilf Claw is our only surviving member, a Veteran (if you can call nearly dying in the first room a veteran.) who will live to tell the tale.

So our first foray probably couldn't have gone much worse.

If I get time I'll add our next few sessions, we're BL 4 now, we've only had about 3/4 sessions since then, but with a new party.

Wild Claw the Elf meets up with another group, enter Gusthas the Barbarian, Thuldren the Dwarf and Torven the Wizard (Brother of the late Hovarth, and just as cantankerous.)







Last edited by Questicus, 8/Sep/2021, 8:26 pm
8/Sep/2021, 8:35 am Link to this post Send Email to Questicus   Send PM to Questicus Blog
 
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Champion

Registered: 03-2017
Posts: 26
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Re: Questicus' Dungeon Journal


Second Session

This session took place a week after the first (We play on Mondays and Tuesdays, between 3-6 hours each day.) and we were eager to try out our new characters and hopefully get to the end of a dungeon with our hides intact.

Turns out, Ranald was with us!

The warriors entered the dungeon onto a corridor, their mission was to slay the Death King, the Barbarian Gusthas took up the blade (+1D6 damage) and we set out into the dungeon.

Thankfully, we managed to get quite a ways in, indeed, the first room we encountered simply had a dying Orc inside. The wretch gave the Barbarian a good thumping (Gusthas refused to wait for him to die) but we took a key off his body.

Torven was no doubt a wiser Wizard than his late brother, for he knew the Healing Hands spell, which proved to be invaluable, he also knew Lightning Bolt and Iron Skin. We were able to heal Barbarian and the rest of the group with decent power rolls as we journeyed forwards.

This is when we started to attract the attention of monsters, when we looked into the next room a swarm of rats started pouring towards us from the other end.

Gusthas the Barbarian and Thuldren the Dwarf (Who must have spent a lot of time in Cathay due to his voice/accent) held the door to keep the rats at bay, allowing only two of the critters to strike at us each turn but this would have been enough to kill them if it wasn't for the Wizard Torven casting Healing hands to get them back up.

Those rats are viscous! (2D6+4?!)but were soon cut down.

There's been nothing much to say about Dungeon Treasure so far, the dying orc and rats between them only had a basic commodities on them, the rats must have nested in some noble robes worth a fair bit of gold (Taken by the Barbarian) and the Orc must have had some spices of Araby on his body somewhere, which the Elf scraped off...much to the disgust of his friends.


The next event triggered (Wizard rolled a 1) turned out to be another dead barbarian. For some reason Wild Claw the Elf, despite seeing what happened to Tulkus (The Barbarian who died in our first session) decided to have a look, maybe he thought it was Tulkus himself. Fortunately, he was luckier than his former friend, because he found a large amount of gold.

Sadly, the noise of the coins in the bag must have alerted more monsters (Draw another event) so we had to fend off an ambush of snotlings. Which were no trouble.

All things considered it was a fairly quiet dungeon, we faced maybe a few groups of skaven which were never too much trouble and even a Squig, which fell asleep and was killed during the next turn. (Leading both us to wonder why it was worth so much gold).

Treasure started to get really interesting, the Wizard managed to grab a Ring of Regeneration from the Squig, very powerful item that added extra healing to the party. Meanwhile the Dwarf acquired a Surefire bow, which he handed to the Elf (Meaning he now almost always hit with his shots)

Finally we found the Objective room, dispatching another fairly easy batch of enemies (We only had to roll twice on our own BL table, using the advanced RP rules for Objective rooms) which consisted of some Beastmen and Giant bats we then took our place around the Liches tomb and finished the him off.

Luckily, our rolls "just" managed to help us avoid being made into thralls, not that the warriors knew that, only the gods knew how close they were to ending their days as part of an undead army. (Both my friend and I shook our heads with relief once we read what would have happened had we rolled 1 less...)

Our objective room treasure was interesting but not overly exciting, the Elf pulled himself a Warning stone of Asuryan (He scoffed, hoping for something more exciting but this object would no doubt save our lives in the future) and the Wizard ended up with a Horn of Vengeance, which he muttered would help him afford studies in the Wizard's tower.

The Barbarian got a mace he wasn't too keen on but was happy to keep the Sword used to kill the Death king (+1D sword at BL 1! We checked, pretty sure the book never says its lost/destroyed) while the Dwarf found a Rod of Power for the Wizard (Who was more than happy to take it off his hands.)

We didn't have a huge amount of gold and didn't want to risk the Hazards too much so we just went to the nearest village, grabbed some ropes and bandages and went to the next dungeon.

All in all, a great adventure, a far cry from the disaster that was the first parties fate, but that is WH Quest isn't it?





Last edited by Questicus, 8/Sep/2021, 7:53 pm
8/Sep/2021, 7:46 pm Link to this post Send Email to Questicus   Send PM to Questicus Blog
 


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