Ghouls, ghouls, ghouls - ODND Solo Dungeon Crawl

Haxos Pt. 3 and D6 Skill System

Alrighty - after a little break for last post’s world building and campaign concept stuff, I dove right back in where I left off (still running Delving Deeper straight out of the book).

At the end, I give a little look at the new “X in D6” skill system I’m working on for my upcoming IRL campaign table…let me know what you think - I know skill systems are a love/hate thing, but I think my players will really enjoy the added choices for development.

Still not 100%, as I always give them the choice to start a campaign as close to RAW as I can manage…for some players it’s easier than dealing with a ton of new rules up front.

Anyways:

This is part 3 of my solo play with Haxos, a now L3 anti-cleric, and his quest to bring back the cult of the dread powers of the old Algol Empire. You can check out the other posts by going to the main article list RIGHT HERE

So - Haxos has a few decisions to make - he takes most of the money he’s earned so far and places it in the keeping of the most faithful cultist, an old man named Kelemar, and bids him spend it on training more fighters.

He names another two acolytes, and sets them to begin their training as well…I make a few basic rules choices and say it will require one month of game time training to get these acolytes and fighting men to where they are essentially “Level 0,” and decide that 250XP earned by them will make them a full L1 in their class and can advance from there. I’m playing fast and loose -  want things to take time but don’t want to get dragged down in subsystems.

Haxos snatches up the map, and I decide it’s to Hex 2704 - the ancient Algol forge stronghold of Azhatria. What’s there? No idea, will figure that out with some random dungeon crawling and reverse engineer things based on what’s rolled to match a narrative.

What concerns me most is the journey there: 5 wilderness hexes through the woods. I have a map, so getting lost isn’t a concern, but random encounters sure are. A part of me wants to take a few new red shirts and grind some XP by making some forays into the woods, but the encounters overland are too crazy and unpredictable for that to be workable - there’s no balance in ODND, and this is definitely a feature not a bug for me.

I still need to rework my own versions of the overland encounter tables, but I’ve been too busy, and just want to make some fun progress and maybe get into the dungeon crawl, so I spend some loot on a few of the 0 Level scumbags and head into the woods.

Unbelievably, dropping 3 six-siders per day/per hex, I encounter…nothing. The woods are eerily quiet, and the party (Haxos, Lyr the Fighter who survived the bear caves, Saemeth, Haxos’ apprentice, and two L0 fighters - a nameless male and female, who’ve been outfitted with spears, shields and chain) arrives at Azhatria.

The fortress is partially submerged in the waters of a fetid lake, with a major portion still rising high out of the water, having been built on a more elevated section of ground before it fell to ruin.

Getting over the water in plate and chain and the like proves to create some difficulties, before settling on doing things the old fashioned way: a terribly unstable bridge is lashed together with all of the party’s rope and a few large felled trees.

No giant toads jump out of the water, a la T1: Hommlet, and entrance into the fortress is through a yawning open portcullis. There are some signs of entry, and the party searches around and finds multiple boats, provisioned and recently hastily hidden.

The obvious questions are - who the hell is it and where the hell did they get there boats/how did they get them here? Azhatria *is* built off the shore of a very large lake, so a village or settlement somewhere is not only possible but likely. 

(All of this stuff was rolled using a simple oracle of rolling a white die against a red die, the red being no, the white being yes, and the distance between numbers acting as a sort of “how much.” An extra red or white is thrown in depending on likelihood. It’s fast and works well for me. I also have been using a few d66 charts I threw together from random word lists)

Inside Azhatria, the fun doesn’t begin immediately, but things get spicy awfully fast. I use the following fast method for generation, RIGHT HERE (they also have a real slick Kal-Arath reference sheet)

But for room or passageway contents I use the 2d6 table from book II of Delving Deeper.

A few rooms in, there’s a dead couple of adventurers. The next room is a posse of 11 skeletons, former soldiers of the fort, maybe? Unlikely since the fall of Algol was a few hundred years back, so these boneheads must be more recent stock. Anyhow, no time to worry much about history…

We smash them, but lose one of the red shirts in the process on an unlucky roll. No use crying over spilled cultists.

Doubling back a ways, a large room is found. There’s some signs of new traffic. Searching for secret doors ensues - a secret door opens up on a small treasure room and secret stairs to an upper floor. The twist is, there’s an NPC party here (from which the dead adventurers came), and they have a lot of folks with em.

Multiple clerics, fighters, seven (!) bodyguards…they may all be L1, but holy cow, its a big group. And we roll 3 on reaction. We roll a 5 on the second reaction. Yeah, they’re hostile - maybe something to do with the fact that we are pretty obviously evil cultists rocking symbols of old Algol, or they just don’t like our faces.

We get the surprise and decide to flee back through the big room and bar from the other side, knowing their only option will be to go up.

This creates a fun little “where are they now?” scenario.

The next room created a not so fun little “who will survive and what will be left of them?” scenario.

Kicking the door in to the next room over, the party is surprised and summarily jumped by 3 ghouls. Things get ugly. Lyr eats a critical hit and bites it, due to wounds suffered from the fight with the skeletons from before that I forgot to heal…the other red shirt gets paralyzed immediately, so does Saemeth.

Haxos uses a Ward Against Undead scroll he picked up along his adventures.

He makes a quick decision and decides…f*ck it, he’ll fight to the death. He is chaotic, but he isn’t a coward, and he is loyal to those who are with the cult. At least, he won’t leave them to be food for ghouls. The next couple rounds are nail-biting, as I really don’t want to lose the PC, but also am committed to a slug-fest for whatever reason. I was feeling reckless, and bit chaotic myself.

By the time Haxos has downed 2 of the ghouls, Sameth unfreezes and joins back in. Haxos gets reduced to exactly 0 HP from a ghoul and I decide to give a death save to him (after all, it IS just my own solo game and I’m pretty understaffed. I roll a 20 on it - Haxos lives.)

Saemeth takes down the remaining ghoul who only has 2 hp at this point, casts a cure light wounds on Haxos, and the crew (now just Haxos, Saemeth and the red shirt) roll back outside, thoroughly shit-kicked, but with a new shield +1 from the ghouls room and whatever gold they could carry.

All in all not exactly a successful first delve at Azhatria - on the other hand, the other red-shirt is now L1, and we do have some new sacks of gold and other trinkets.

The gang decides to steal the other party’s boats, scuttle the bridge, and scope out the shores of the lake to see what settlements are out here in this part of Sylvannar.

To be continued.

Thoughts:

I’ve been developing the world of Callastor further in preparation for my IRL table to begin this coming weekend.

It may be heresy, but I think I’ve settled on no Thief, and 9 “x in d6” style skills that all PCs will have, beginning at 1 and increasing with point buy each level from there.

I’ve settled on:

Alchemy/Athletics/Bushcraft/Engineer/Lore/Sleight/Smith/Stealth/Trade

Fighters will get 2 points per level, no more than one into each skill per level, all other classes will receive 1 point only to indicate their extreme focus on spell craft or religious precepts etc. I think this will make for a nice variance in fighters and open up the way for players to have fun with ranger, thief, and other archetypes without a separate class system.

I’ve also developed more of the various cultures and regions for my huge redrawn Outdoor Survival Map, and I’ll share some of that in the next post.

Keep your blades sharp!

-CG

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