Serpents of Chaos - Delve 5 - Serpent Tunnels

Welcome to Serpents of Chaos. This is an AD&D 1e RAW dungeoncrawl through the Cursed Chambers of Tsennacherib. We game in classic adventure style: focus on exploration, a mapper and no VTT, and player skill is central. The setting is Iron Age Hyborian Steppe.

Tonight, four intrepid adveturers head into the dungeon: Ursula the Thief, Buddy the Cleric (now level 2), as well as two newcomers: Leinahtan and Lurin the Fighters.

Drawn here by the promise of treasure and by the secrets of the Serpent-Men, they headed in. Soon, Ursula discovered that her covered pit trap had fooled two ape-men, who were now dead from their headlong fall into the snake tunnels below.

The party decided to lower themselves down, but not before spotting a glow of red up ahead in the gloom. A few adventurers crept up to investigate. It was a fire beetle.

Buddy and Leinahtan stayed to play "Beetle," a game where you charge a giant beetle and the first one to back out loses (apparently played by Buddy when he was a youngster).

With my newly-acquired mastery of the grappling rules (we had a couple of brawls during downtime), we dove right in. For all the flak that Gary's unarmoured combat receives, it is not that complicated. It's not quick. But it's not complex, either. There are some choices to make and some math. But it took all of 30 seconds to get things rolling and only a couple minutes to finish combat.

This was due to Leinahtan's luck. He beat Buddy to the beetle and dove right in for an overbear. He scored a great hit, putting this thing in a headlock and immediately subduing it. For the rest of the game he had a glowing fire beetle tied around his neck, giving him some light down in the snake tunnels. Awesome.

After combat, the whole party descended the snake tunnels. They checked the dead ape-men and found one of them had a blowgun and some darts. Myriads of snakes slithered every which way and attempted to get into boots and up pant legs. But luckily a couple lit torches and some fire beetle glands kept them at bay.

The party came to a tunnel lined with large snake skulls, each one marked with symbols from the outer planes. Most of the symbols were those of Tarterus, where the Old Serpent-God is said to be chained in gloomy torment. 

They smashed all of the skulls, naturally. This yielded a small stash of assorted coins.

Another tunnel offshoot they ventured down was dotted with pools. The first one held a glinty hint of coins. The second: bubbles.

These bubbles turned out to be a calm and observant crocodile. It watched them while they picked some handfuls of coins. By this time a wandering monster roll came up positive (hasn't happened often!) and a Khitemian slaver is rolled on the chart. I then roll to determine how many: one. Great, let's do this.

 

A Khitemian. Thanks Frazetta.

He holds a torch and the party hears him coming around the corner roughly 30' away. As he appears he is in the usual Khitemian getup: a wicked bronze scimitar and a large, horned helmet. They get one segment of surprise on him. Ursula tries to sneak through the shadows for a backstab (but fails) and the others draw their weapons. The Khitemian is too slow to run and he receives an arrow right between the eyes--thanks to Lurin's bow.

They loot him and find a few coins as well as a double-sided piece of paper. One side contains notes about some contract between the slavers and the Serpent-Men. The other side is a treasure map!

A contract?

A treasure map?

The adventurers left the crocodile alone and nosed around the rest of the tunnels. They got bit by some small snakes, found a secret door to the long entrance corridor where Jorduu got darted last time, as well as another secret door to a large cavern (Ursula sees a fallen stalactite as she closes this last door). Both of these are doors were in the ceilings of the snake tunnels, so they must lead back up to level 1 of the dungeon. 

Some more coins are found, and pocketed, and the party retires to town with a decent padding of cash and a handy note for next time...

Serpents of Chaos - Delve 4 - Death's Doors

This session was wild. 

We only had two characters delve into the dungeon: Enkidu (dwarf fighter) and Aridaeus (human paladin). But they had help. Buddy had sent a letter to Bythunia telling them that Tobruk was wasting away in some prison cell in the Chambers. So Tobruk's cousin Tonis and his retainer Ereclis came to get him out themselves. Too bad Tobruk had been reduced to basically a hambone in his jail cell.

So those two Bythunians accompanied the party into the dungeon, as well as Enkidu's hirelings, Galenos (torch-bearer) and Vuk (man-at-arms). All in all, there were five fighting men. But five blades didn't help them in their first encounter!

They traipsed through the first cavern, passing the pile of shite and the stream. They set fire to some gray lotus leaves in the second cavern. The old, mangy quaggoths that were harvesting the flowers ran away. Then they went east into the tunnel where the kobolds and fire beetles were fighting a few sessions ago. But instead of continuing east, they turned south. The walls, no longer natural rock, were quarried sandstone with bas-relief on either side.

Bas-relief (but imagine this in plain sandstone)

They approached a door, upon which was carved the face of an aurochs. They listened and heard nothing interesting. So Enkidu and Aridaeus braced the door and shoved it inwards. It broke, flying open. Inside, two quaggoths sat on the ground at a low table. They were tall, shaggy, white-furred bipedal monsters, somewthing between an ape, a bear, and a massive human. A serpent-man stood over the seated quaggoths, his back to the party, donning bronze scale mail and a wicked scimitar.

(Even though I knew their eventual response would turn hostile, I rolled a reaction roll to see what their initial response would be. And I got a 55, which rendered them neutral, so I had them "watch" the party for the first few seconds.)

The quaggoths rose to their intimidating heigh of seven or eight feet tall, grabbing their battle axes, crude but sharp, stone weapons. There was a moment to parlay as the three monsters turned and took stock of the intruders.

The party said few words. They charged in. The monsters charged as well. A clash of steel, fur, stone, and bronze immediately turned deadly. In the first round, Vuk the man-at-arms went down to a heavy blow from a quaggoth stone-axe. Next round, the serpent-man delivered a mortal blow to Aridaeus. And on the third round, Enkidu suffered the same fate at the edge of the serpent-man's blade. None of the party had scored any substantial hits against the monsters. Tonis and Ereclis, seeing no Tobruk in sight, grabbed Gelanos and ran back to town.

We all breathed out sighs of suprise and sadness. Some good fighters were lost that delve. A graveyard was set up in the discord. Then we delved on.

We took ten minutes to grab drinks and choose new characters. The players decided to grab two new characters each, which I allowed since that would make a party of four: Shamuu (cleric), Jordu (thief), Ursula (thief), and Zanuptra (magic-user). 

They heard that there was another entrance to the southeast of the one the other adventurers had been using. It a 20' wide switchbacked tunnel in the earth. With Jordu on point, they delved in. They found an Ashurian gold coin with the face of a snake-eyed king, a skull with snake-like fangs floating in some puddle, a pit trap leading into a snake-infested tunnel, and a trove of keys (30 in total). Flaming oil was tossed onto the snakes without a second thought.

After the keys, there was a double-door situated at the end of the tunnel. They were 10' tall, made of cedar, banded in bronze, with bas-relief decorations of aurochs, elephants, serpents, and greatcats--the four sacred animals of the Ashurian empire. It was locked. They took ten minutes trying keys and finally found one that worked.

Beyond, a 20' wide hallway extended for more than a hundred feet. Massive! Strewn on the floor were several skeletons. Ten feet in, a raised porticullis stood guard. Alcoves lined the sides of the hallway, housing massive urns. The thief Jordu bravely scouted on ahead. He heard a dart ping off the sandstone walls. So he picked up the pace and kept going down the hall. Another dart caught him in the shoulder and his wound began to turn with the warnings of poison. He noticed arrow slits in the sides of the corridors, spaced every so often. Was it a trap with a trigger? Or blowguns in the hands of hidden attackers?

Dart traps? Or blowguns?

 

This whole time, the rest of the party cheerleaded from the double-doors.

As Jordu was about 50 or 60 feet down the hallway (still seeing no end), the porticullis closed. He ran back to try and get out, feeling the poison spread. The porticullis was damaged and at the bottom there was a halfling-sized hole. He squeezed through just as two large, white, shaggy quaggoths started walking down the hall to finish him off, stone axes at the ready. The party escaped the way they came, locking the double doors behind them. They heard the porticullis raise and the quaggoths start to jostle the doors. Before the party left for good, Zanuptra cast ventriloquism just behind the quaggoths and procured some edtritch ramblings in a booming voice. The quaggoths stopped fiddling with the door and ran off.

By this time, the party was finished with the Chambers. No loot was scored, but information is treasure and plenty of that was gained that night.