Gateway to the Dreamscapes: Megadungeon Campaign Log

[Ameraaaaaa]

Chapter Three: Early August

Spoiler: Market Street: Expedition 5

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Mayor Gallefort calls Kumiko to his office and tells her that from now on she is to give her reports to Christopher Thorne, the publisher of the local gazette. He wants her to work with him in allaying the people’s fears about the monsters and the extra expense of maintaining a watch around the clock. Flossie butts in and asks if he would like them to make it sound like he is doing more to protect the town than sending mentally ill people to their deaths underground, and he nods, thinking they are sharing a joke.

Flossie outright refuses. She doesn’t trust the mayor or Thorn. She says that the man only runs the paper as an excuse to publish his poetry. Kumiko asks if it is that bad, and Flossie says no, it’s just that nobody around here cares.

The group returns to the underground, first deciding to explore the street marked as Winsome Heights.

The street slopes downward and is filled with knee-deep water that they think is probably coming in direct from the aquifer. The current is rough, and they have to brace themselves to remain steady.

They move down the street, seeing boarded-up storefronts on either side. They don’t have a crowbar, so Feurlina decides to simply bash their doors down with her mace. As she does so, Jesse screams and falls into the water where her lantern goes out; they have attracted the attention of a school of carnivorous eels.

Flossie climbs onto the wall using her heart of vines, while Kumiko ties herself to the door. Feurlina swipes at the eels with her mace as the current pulls Jesse away.

The group disperses the eels, but Jesse is unconscious and Feurlina moves to head her off, stepping out of the torchlight and over the ledge of a great pit. With uncanny dexterity, she manages to catch herself with one hand and the unconscious harper with the other.

Kumiko, bound by rope, moves slowly to them and strains herself pulling the rotund person up and into a dry foyer on the street side. Feurlina has a much harder time lifting herself back up, especially with the weight of her armor pulling her down.

Eventually, the group finds some manner of shelter, and Flossie revives Jesse with an alchemical tonic, and she does her best to bind the numerous bite marks that mar her body.

Flossie and her tulpa climb along the walls and look at the pit, and decide it was once a storm drain, but was damaged at some point and is now a yawning hole into the dark unknown below.

Feurlina gets back to smashing the doors, and finds nothing but a flood of mud, algae, and stagnant water behind them, save for one, which is the back door to the Cordwood Junction.

This was once a lumber yard, but decades of dampness have ruined the neatly stacked wood. The intruder’s warm breath disturbs a swarm of stymphalians that have nested in here; large heavily armored mosquitos named after the brass owls of legend. Kumiko lights one of the clay grenades that she has prepared to deal with swarms and kills many of them, but those that remain seek the blood of their attackers, their long needle-like beaks finding tender flesh. They are beaten to death, although the last one is crawling about under Feurlina’s armor, causing the big girl to panic until Kumiko deftly jabs with her sword, skewering the creature when it goes for Feurlina’s throat. Rai holds it out for a moment, as if offering a kabob.

She then looks through the creature’s nests in the rotting wood, and, not knowing that they do not lay eggs until after they have fed, decides to burn them, but cannot get a fire going in the damp. They find an exquisite set of carpenter’s tools in the shop, but there is almost a century of rust upon them, and they decide to take them up to town to sell to a craftsman with a lot of patience and even more oil.

Emerging from the front door of the shop, they move down the lane to Dissenting Discoveries. This shop is inhabited by four strange humanoid creatures, eyeless and with four arms each, their heads split open by great vertical mouths that do nothing but scream. These beasts are put down by Kumiko’s exquisite swordsmanship and Flossie’s uncanny magic, the latter’s hair turning as black as the void energies she summons up.

This store appears to be some sort of museum. In the center of the room is a desk filled with numerous mold-stained historical documents, none of which seem significant to the explorers. On the walls and in display cases are numerous strange artifacts, those apparently made by cultures and of technologies not known to any of them, some appearing downright alien. They can’t carry it all, but they take what seems most valuable back to sell at the bazaar next month.

The next shop is an indoor archery range called Falconer’s Square. It is the nest of a great terror bird, and Kumiko wonders where it came from and what it is eating. They attempt to calm it, but it takes offense to Jesse’s unnatural presence, and attacks savagely.

The bird destroys the tulpa, and shatters Feurlina’s improvised shield before they can bring it down. They cook the beast and search it’s nest. They find nothing of great value, save some bolts that will fit Jesse’s crossbow, and the remains of a few small animals, mostly earth hounds and kobolds. No eggs, so they eat the bird instead, delivering the leftovers to their goblinoid allies.

Flossie conjures a new tulpa, this one in the shape of a cloud of fireflies, and well as conjuring a temporary shield for Feurlina out of ectoplasm.

Finally, they move into a tiled building called the Merciful Bleed. It appears to have once been some sort of hospice or doctor’s office, with several patients’ beds. Everything of value has been cleared out, although they do find an old book of faded photographs that is remarkably well preserved and might be either a valuable clue or a memento for someone in town.

In the back, there is an adobe arch, and beyond it a hallway leading north and south. To the south, a sign proclaims, lies the Vertex Stash, and to the north, the Rancid Dash. Not much liking the sound of the latter, the group goes south, much to their misfortune.

The Vertex Stash appears to have once been a storeroom, but it has collapsed into a massive sinkhole. Within the churning mud water-logged human corpses float, and upon sensing living beings they shamble to their feet and moan, much like the zombies in the funeral parlor on the other side of the market.

The explorers form fighting positions, and do well, although these are tight corners, and Flossie must climb the walls to get a proper line of fire, her hair turning purple to match the eldritch blasts she fires. One of the shambling beasts grapples Jesse, biting his shoulder and causing him to fire his crossbow into the air, striking and wounding Flossie on the wall above.

The ghasts, for that is what they are, are clumsy, but there are lots of them, and Flossie can see that there are far more in the pit than should be possible, an endless tide of the walking dead. She attempts to cast a spell to collapse the ceiling, but her aim is off, and Kumiko is wounded by falling rocks.

Flossie conjures a wall of tentacles to cover their escape as they fall back to town.

Spoiler: Interlude: Evermoon Bayou

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That night, Kumiko has a dream about visiting Arianna in her bed, running her lips across the softest portions of the girl’s body, and then pulling back, her teeth stained with blood. She awakens to an agonizing sore throat, and though she is terribly thirsty both water and wine burn to drink, and she discovers her well-manicured fingernails are dropping off into pools of black blood.

She goes to the temple, and finds that Jesse is suffering from similar symptoms. Feurlina does not appear to have been bit, and Flossie seems to have a natural immunity. But Rai and Jesse are in bad shape, and Flossie does the best she can to mix up an alchemical cure for the strange pathogen that the ghasts carry within their tainted fluids.

Feurlina decides it is cheaper to replace her shield than to have it repaired, and spends the extra money on an actual military shield, an heirloom left over from one of the Warlord’s armies.

Once they are well, the group returns to the dungeon.

Spoiler: Market Street: Expedition 6

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They find that the Merciful Bleed is now overrun with the ghasts, and this fight goes much the same as the last. They are quickly surrounded and Jesse and Feurlina are both bitten, though Kumiko manages to keep her distance through superior grace and skill. Flossie thins out their numbers with a blast of magical fire, and then conjures more tentacles of the old ones to hold their reinforcements at bay. The companions hack the front line of the undead to pieces, and then scurry backward, slamming the door behind them and holding it shut while Jesse goes to find a piece of metal scaffolding to jam the hinges.

Jesse cleans their wounds as best as she can, hoping they were not again exposed to the diseases that the corpse-men carry.

They decide to go pay back the Ologs for the previous defeat, and make their way back to the Wolf’s Den Tavern. On Privateer’s Street, they find that there is another monitor lizard in the same spot, and Jesse shrieks that it has come back from the dead. Flossie tosses up her holy symbol to keep it at bay as Feurlina moves to dispatch it, but it doesn’t work, and the large woman is bitten in the leg. It is fortunate for her that the ghastly fever she contracted during the last fight is already altering her metabolism, for this is no mere monitor lizard, but a basilisk, and its bite means almost certain death.

Kumiko moves in and deftly beheads the lizard, and then takes care to avoid its still snapping jaws as she tosses it’s head into a deep pool of mud.

The hooded kobolds stare at them as they pass and move in behind them. The group engages the three giants in the tavern, and uses careful hit-and-run tactics, inflicting bleeding wounds that will be fatal in time, although Feurlina is nearly grappled and pulled into the melee.

These creatures are tougher than stone and do not go down easy, and the group again prepares to fall back, but finds that the kobolds have closed in behind them in the garden, and cross their heavy axes, barring the door. This is, apparently, a fight to the death.

In the end, Kumiko and Jesse are both downed, and Feurlina is only standing because she is numb to pain due to the combination of ghastly fever and basilisk venom in her blood. But, all three olags have succumbed to the masterful incisions that Kumiko has placed in their veins.

Then the kobolds bid the pair of tatzelwurms who dwell in the garden to bring Feurlina down. The strange skink-like creatures are surprisingly strong for their size, and their disproportionally large claws can tear through her armored plates with little trouble, and soon she is bleeding on the ground along with her companions.

Flossie conjures a pair of tulpas with oozing toxic skin to grapple with the monsters, and soon both tatzelwurms and tulpas are slain and she is staring down at the eight kobolds who block her exist, their faces unreadable behind the executioner’s hoods.

Then, the door to the blacksmith’s shop across the garden opens, and an old raspy voice chuckles and says “This is the part where you beg for your lives and make promises you have no intention of ever keeping.”

Out walks a manticore, a creature with the body of a large lion, the tail of a scorpion, and the face of a cruel old man.

Kumiko does her best to stand and bow, asking his name, and the manticore tells her he lost it as part of the transformation process.

She asks him what he will accept in exchange for their lives, and he tells them they have nothing of value to him.

They ask if he wants a new name, and the manticore says he will accept it, but he doesn’t much care as he doesn’t like being called on to begin with.

They say that if he lets them finish their mission he will have no more trouble with the town above, and the manticore laughs and says the town doesn’t trouble him, they don’t come down here, and when he comes up there they are none the wiser.

He has no use for treasure, only the pleasure of the kill and a hunger for prey with just enough fight left in it to know what is happening.

They say they will not bring him people to feed on, and he says he wasn’t talking about people, surely there are enough abhuman creatures dwelling above that the town could do with a good cleansing.

Flossie agrees there are a few non-human residents of the bayou, but she will not sacrifice her neighbors.

They will, however, bring him captives from below if that is all he values. The manticore looks uncertain, and Feurlina makes the suggestion that he take their harpist. Jesse attempts to sing, hoping to charm the beast, but only coughs up blood and squawks, and the manticore drives his stinger into her, rendering her paralyzed.

He then smashes her crossbow in his mighty paws and hands the ruin to Flossie, and tells the terrified kobolds to drag Jesse into his lair.

The manticore looks at them for a long moment and says very well, you may live, for now, in exchange for your bard, a name, and any captives you find below. But I also want one more thing.

He looks at Kumiko and tells her that he doesn’t trust women or foreigners, but he understands her kind is obsessed with honor, so he wants her to swear that if she believes his life is at risk, she will fight to defend him with her dying breath. Kumiko thinks for a moment, and then nods.

They then depart, dragging Feurlina along behind them.

Feurlina is in bad shape, and won’t last long. They send Dennis off to fetch a real doctor, while Arianna and Flossie attempt to keep the giant woman alive.
Flossie tells Kumiko that Jesse is dead because of her. Jesse was odd, but she was a friend, and if Feurlina doesn’t survive, the two of them are done, she will never adventure with Kumiko again, and will curse the day the stranger ever came into town.

She says the kobolds are bad enough, but now you have allied us with a maniac who has no obligation to help them or even refrain from killing them for sport. Kumiko thinks back, and realizes that she has sworn to defend the manticore, but it offered no favors in turn, or even a promise of safe conduct.

Flossie looks at her seriously and says that if they are to remain companions, she needs Kumiko’s promise that if the manticore betrays them, it will be a fight to the death, one way or the other.

Kumiko is silent, again reflecting on the conflicted loyalties that brought her so far from home.

This session did not go well, at least from the players perspective.

First, the players seem really reticent to talk in character, either to each other or to NPCs, which is odd because there was such good RP in the first session.

Second, Jesse's player is kind of done with him / her. Part of it, I think, it the tone of the game being more serious than she intended and the other players are not really willing to banter with her. Also, mechanically, the character doesn't function, and since I am being much more thorough about policing dice rolls this game, she is struggling mechanically. She stopped to roll up a new character mid session, and then took the first opportunity to volunteer for sacrifice at the end.

Third, the fight with the ghasts went bad for the party. After the second attempt, they told me how they always struggle with reinforcements. I told them I knew, at which point they, exasperated, asked me why I still used reinforcement mechanics if I knew they would struggle with them. I responded that it isn't my job to handle them easy wins, but to provide variety, and the reason that they struggle is because they don't adjust their tactics; using their usual defensive strategies rather than being more proactive. They told me the fight was "impossible" and I told them they did fine the first time, they just didn't think to seal the door behind them when the retreated, and the second time they failed to adjust their tactics in any way to compensate.


Finally, they had to cut a deal with a monster for the second time in two sessions. From a mechanical and story line perspective, this is great, it gives them allies in the dungeon, a source of information and lore, safe passage through some areas, and a lot of in character drama. Out of character though, things are not going so great.

In short, the players value wealth and pride above all else; including XP, completing their objectives, and even their character's lives. As a result, a game where they lose fights and cut deals with monsters is simply not "fun" for them. As I am the only one who is invested in the "lore" or the "story", including their character's personal stories, they consider it a huge favor to me to not suicide their characters when things start going wrong as they would much rather die and start a fresh game than continue one with the sting of a previous setback hanging over their head.


Next week we are probably going back to Brian's game, hopefully this isn't the end of this one, but at this point who can say?

Sorry about the player troubles. Seems like they are a strange combination of murder hobos of the looting variety and sore losers of the rage quitting variety. I'm sorry you have to deal with them.