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View Full Version : What Happens in the Caves of Chaos, STAYS in the Caves of Chaos



LibraryOgre
2010-08-02, 01:42 AM
A fragment of a DM's campaign journal.

Tonight was a fairly awesome session. It started pretty late (target: ~2. Actual: ~6. There was waiting for an AC repairman involved), and we got rid of a couple players from our first session,* but things were pretty well. Our cast is a human Ranger, a human Cleric of Gond (god of craftsmen and invention; I let him trade out Turn Undead of a thief's Traps and Open Locks abilities at half his level), human fighter (nobleman whose main inspiration is Max Bialystock from The Producers), a half-elf wizard and a half-elf thief. We're playing C&C, 'cause that's what the cool kids play. I slotted our replacement cleric in the old cleric's spot, ignored the missing half-orc fighter, and picked up where we left off, on the ridge above the Caves of Chaos, about mid-afternoon.

The last session ended with them interrogating a captured bugbear as to what was going on in the valley (there had been two; they captured on, killed the other). He had let them know the no one goes into the cave at the bottom of the defile (the owlbear cave), that the clerics (who I assigned to Myrkul) hired humanoids for occasional jobs but mostly ignored everyone, and that the bugbears mostly raided against whoever came back with good stuff. The party knew nothing of why the cave was shunned, or of the minotaur, or of most of the inhabitants of the caves.

First, the ranger and the Gondsman made a man-trap over the cleric's cave. Nothing major, but enough to maybe catch one person. At that point, the sun is going down behind the defile, so they back off, find a secluded grove, and sleep for the night. Fortunately, with the ranger setting their camo, they're not discovered. During the evening, they come up with the plan that they need somewhere to hide in the defile... a relatively safe place. They figure "If one cave is shunned by everyone, they won't notice quickly that it's been cleaned out. We'll go in there." So they went into the owlbear cave.

Now, I made a couple changes. The owlbear cave was quite as disgusting as the module made it out to be. I figured the owlbear's own den was kind of nasty, and there was some stuff on the way back, but the gray oozes left it alone, just cleaning up its "leftovers". They'd learned to keep away from it, and it had learned that bothering them was painful. But with the grey oozes dissolving things, there wasn't nearly as much rotting garbage around... the oozes dissolved it. With less rotting garbage and predatory oozes, there were no rats to speak of. Since they were coming in at about midmorning, though, the owlbear was happily sleeping off the half a gnoll that it had eaten from the night before. The stench WAS bad enough that the cleric took out some soap he'd bought, and rubbed it into some cloths to cover their noses from the stench.

The party made a molotov cocktail from some oil and flasks, threw it at the owlbear, and let it charge a two-person spear hedge. The ranger missed; the fighter critted, her spear set. 3D8+3 puts quite a dent in the owlbear's HP, but it still took a couple rounds to knock it down. They spend some time taking trophies from the owlbear (head, paws, a few choice pieces of meat), then finished exploring the cave.

This brought them to the cave of the pool, smelling very sharply. Things look bad for a moment, but they remember something: These things use acid. We have a lot of soap. So they started throwing chunks of soap (i.e. the most pH basic thing they had) into the acid-monsters. One of their spears got dissolved, and there were some acid burns, especially to the fighter, but they've cleared the cave with chemistry. They now have a relatively safe place to rest, and so proceed to butcher and thoroughly salt and smoke the owlbear meat, and begin preserving its hide. I kid you not... the cleric was carrying a couple pounds of salt. His concept was a wandering tinker and trader, and salt is valuable.

After that, they start looking around. Their assignment isn't to kill everything, but get useful intelligence, so they start wondering what they CAN kill without others noticing. Watching from the cave mouth, they get a rough census of the caves (noting but not being able to identify the ogre), but the two places they remain ignorant of are the cave right above them, and the "creepy cave" (the clerics). They figure they will investigate the cave right above them.

For those without your map of the Caves of Chaos handy, my 1st level characters just marched into the Minotaur's Labyrinth on fine morning. Through amazing good luck, they manage to not get lost, and come upon the minotaur, lounging on a throne, eating a "drumstick" from it's convenient boot-shaped holder. It stands up in what I described as a chain mail poncho, hefting it's spear, and is about to charge... but the wizard beats him to the punch, and casts charm person.

Now, as you know, Charm Person should not work on a minotaur. However, I decided that, if it failed a very easy save, it would have some effect. It's DC was 19... base 18, plus caster level 1. It had a 12 bonus to the roll... 7 for HD, and a +5 because she was casting it on the wrong kind of target. The die came up a 4. I let it slide from "Hostile" to "Unfriendly" and demand what they wanted.**

They choose to bribe the minotaur. First, they get its agreement to leave them alone, in exchange for 100# of preserved owlbear meat. The minotaur pretty much can't refuse such an offer. The Gondsman offers to improve its armor, in exchange for it going to beat up the ogre. It demands the armor be done first, and the Gondsman agrees, even asking it if it has additional pieces to help make the armor better. The minotaur brings out the magical plate, and the Gondsman refuses to destroy it; the minotaur instead demands that the Gondsman use his own armor to make armor for the minotaur. It takes three days; there's a brief discussion of poisoning the meat before giving it to the minotaur, but they can't find anything that the minotaur wouldn't smell, so the idea is abandoned, as was the idea to rob the minotaur while he took out the ogre. In the end, the Gondsman builds what I considered a "Roman Ensemble" armor... a fitted chainmail shirt, a padded mail coif, and a short kilt made of the Gondsman's scale mail armor, and leather vambraces... everything could be made with just tools at hand, and no pressing need for a forge.

The minotaur called out the ogre and the party watched... both the fight, and the humanoids who watched it. The fight was no contest. The minotaur had an AC of 20, a +10 to attack (7HD +1 spear +2 because minotaurs get a +2 hit and damage when using weapons), compared to the Ogre's +4 to hit (4hd) and AC of 14. It was simply a slaughter, while the orcs, bugbears and gnolls cheered, and the goblins and hobgoblins watched aghast (since the ogre was their reluctant ally). The party now has their intelligence (save knowing what's going on in the cleric's cave, but I've dropped hints that there are Red Wizards in there, since the wizard PC hates them and is hunting them). They're going to return to town and get paid, and probably be told to lead a small force back there.


*A husband and wife duo. I was somewhat sorry to lose the wife... she took great joy in playing her half-orc fighter and hitting things. Her husband, however, was creepy. "I take semen samples from the dead hobgoblin" creepy. "My cleric has to touch your boobs to heal you" creepy. His wife asking him to not get them kicked out of another gaming group creepy. We were all happier with him not there.
**There are a lot of situations where this wouldn't work. Against the bugbears, it likely wouldn't work because they usually work in teams... even if bugbear A isn't feeling hostile, it will support its tribemate who is. I might have let this slide on the ogre. Not the absolute reading of the spell, but a fun option.