What happened in Session 18
Characters and Retainers at the start of the session:
- Freddy plays Trunchkin, Level 5 Friar
- Peter plays Albert, Level 5 Woodgrue
- Ythan plays Clement, Level 5 Enchanter
- Calum plays Hogrid, level 2 Cleric
- Elain - Clement's dog, level 2
- Gunter - Trunchkin's dog, level 2
- Max - Clement's retainer - Hunter, level 2
- Petra - Albert's retainer - Thief, level 2
- Ella - Albert's retainer - Bard, level 2
Friday the 12th, from 11.00 to 13.30
The session opened with the Magpies already inside the Deep Carbon Observatory. Most of the party stood in the Nightingale Hall beside the yawning bronze pit that housed the gravity knife. Only Albert was elsewhere, having slipped away to explore alone at the base of the Weighing Station.
Albert passed through the chamber of the colossal Nightingale Chain and discovered a storage room. Several crates contained precious Cervit lamellae - very valuable but time-consuming to collect. Estimating roughly half an hour’s work, he set about gathering them.
About twenty minutes into the task, with most of the lamellae secured, he heard a sound from the direction of the Nightingale pit. He attempted to hide, but was not successful. A pallid, flaccid arm of grotesque proportions unfolded itself from the pit, bending in ways no limb should bend, reaching outward into the chamber. Rather than flee, Albert tried to affect the creature with his enchanted music. The magic had no effect.
The snatching of Albert by Ythan
The hand seized him. He struggled as the colossal fingers tightened around him, attempting to hack through one of them, but his blows failed to inflict meaningful damage. As the creature lifted him toward its mouth, he hurled an axe at its face, missing as it crushed him between its teeth. The rest of the party heard only his scream while he was devoured alive.
Albert died there, alone among his prized Cervit lamellae.
The Giant
Peter’s new character, Chadwick the mage, joined the Magpies immediately afterwards.
For the sake of pace of play, he simply appeared. I do not enjoy contriving improbable justifications for replacement characters; I am content to sacrifice verisimilitude when it serves the flow of the game, and the table was happy to accept him without question.
Shaken but undeterred, the party pressed deeper, descending into the slave caves below. The chambers contained only meagre remnants of former occupants, but the purpose of the space was unmistakable. In one cell, they found a living prisoner locked inside a cruel, razor-wired stockade. His tongue had been cut out. Communication was slow and limited to blinking eyes.
Working carefully under a magical bubble of silence, they broke the mechanism without alerting the rest of the dungeon. Once freed, the prisoner was asked how to pass the Calcite guardians. He took a blade, carved the word “Observation” into the wall, and then crawled weakly toward the exit.
I altered the source material here. I struggle with portraying mental illness in a way that feels respectful and not reductive, so instead of presenting him as insane, I made him mute. It felt cleaner and less prone to caricature.
The Razzor locked
The Magpies also noticed a brown, yeasty growth clinging to the ceiling of another cell but chose not to disturb it. In the final chamber, they discovered two heavy brass-bound bells on a shelf and four squat, headless lead constructs on the floor—sealed suits of opaque hydraulic tubing, reinforced as though meant to withstand immense pressure.
Curiosity prevailed. One bell was poked while the second was connected to one of the suits; the machine lurched fully into motion. When it could not find the other bell immediately, the construct turned aggressive. Rather than fight it, the Magpies returned the second bell to it.
The suit crashed the bell under its feet and then smashed itself violently against a wall, rupturing and releasing a black ooze from the suit and the bell both. Both viscous shapes slithered toward the open bronze pit and vanished into the darkness below. The magpie understood that the Observatory civilisation used slaves, but not all slaves were human.
At this point, the party split. Clement and Hogrid returned to the Weighing Station, while Trunchkin and Chadwick descended into the central pit of the Fulgarium and followed a corridor toward the Mirror Cell.
At the Weighing Station, Clement deciphered the function of the scale and set it to measure “Loyalty.” Hogrid discovered something unsettling: not only could his loyalty to his church be quantified, but it weighed less than Gunter’s loyalty to Trunchkin. Clement, meanwhile, looted the most valuable weight units from the lower chamber.
In the Mirror Cell, Trunchkin and Chadwick examined a slab of polished obsidian. It reflected their images, but something else moved faintly behind the surface. Focusing his mind and risking psychic harm, Trunchkin forced his perception beyond the reflection. He glimpsed fragments of life within the Observatory before its fall—flashes of activity, ritual, and purpose—and through sheer mental discipline he extracted a word. It appears to pacify the second rank of Calcite guardians.
Here, too, I modified the original text. The module provides only a single way to learn each password required to progress through the Fulgarium. I introduced multiple instances of the same passwords to prevent a dead end. Given how quickly the party is recovering them, I may have been too generous.
The session closed with the Magpies deeper within the Observatory than ever before, one companion dead, new knowledge in hand, and the dungeon slowly yielding its secrets. The delve goes on.
XP Summary
Treasure Recovered
- 700 gp worth of precious materials were found in the weight room
Hostile Encounters Overcome
- Survived a slave engine powered by a black ooze
Feats of Exploration
- Explored five rooms
- Opened the stocks and freed a slave prisoner
- Gained information from the prisoner about the Calcite Guardians
- Discovered additional insights in the mirror room
- Figured out how the weighting station functions
Totals
- Trunchkin gains 888 XP and reaches 18279 XP; they have 30% of the necessary XP to progress to level 6
- Chadwik gains 1185 XP and reaches 1185 XP; they have 47% of the necessary XP to progress to level 2
- Clement gains 0 XP and reaches 21107 XP; they have 50% of the necessary XP to progress to level 6
- Hogrid gains 1185 XP and reaches 3177 XP. LEVEL UP! Character ascended to level 3
- Elain (dog, level 2) gain 296 XP and reach 6094 XP.
- Gunter (dog, level 2) gain 296 XP and reach 5263 XP.
- Max (Hunter, level 2) gains 296 XP and reaches 2683 XP.
- Petra (Thief, level 2) gains 296 XP and reaches 2683 XP. LEVEL UP! Character ascended to level 3
- Ella (Bard, level 2) gains 296 XP and reaches 2683 XP.
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All the details about Deep Carbon Observatory belong to Patrick Stuart - Buy the module - His Blog - My Review - Video Review
All the art belongs to Scap Princess - Buy her stuff - Her Blog
All the elements of Dolmenwood belong to Gavin Norman - Buy the system - Video Review
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