Osric: The story so far (pt 1)

Preamble: My good friend Jay moved across the country at the end of the summer. He is the best GM I know and it was a sad loss for a local gaming situation. Luckily we have started to play some games via skype/google hangouts. Due to our work schedules and the time shift it typically ends up with my jumping out of bed early in the morning for a few hours of gaming...pretty fantastic really.

I joined a game he was running for his girlfriend in early December, and it has been convenient to play when the 3 of us are all available.

My character Jenks (a druid) was frustrated by the local ecological damage done by some bandits (poop in the spring water, etc). He impressed (as in press ganged) some travellers on the road and went hunting for the bandits lair. He met Alyssa's PC Scabs (a gnomish 'business man' [thief]) and his enormous son Chester in an abandoned village. They managed to find the bandits lair in the tumble down temple and cleared it out. It happened to reside within a dungeon now known as the dark crypt of Kas the bloody. The first floor contained a goblin tribe (the notched ear tribe) and the bandits (with a truce/specific areas) as well a dark temple with animated congregants, a strange picture room where the eyes follow you, the well of stars (drinking the water makes people disappear according to the goblins), a crypt of a powerful warrior (which yielded some henchmen corpses and a powerful magic sword), a room full of corpses caused by a lightning fast animated dagger, and numerous room and door traps. An old NPC friend of scabs was restored to life by a genie and the impressive fighter Renault joined our party.

Other notable events included charming one of the bandits (Quisling) who helped us trick their sentries and set up an ambush before clearing out the main living quarters. He was encouraged to 'get his revenge' on his buddies and ended up dying in a 1:1 knife fight with the last bandit. A clever fight was engineered between the notched ear goblins and the bandits as well, both suspected the other had broken truce (although it was just us blundering around). We gave the goblin a might magic item (a stack of ivory playing cards which he acted as though had great power) in a bribe to allow us in the goblin area. We told them of the duplicity of the bandits who had thrown us out because we wanted to honor the truce. We managed to time our attack to help clear out the bandits and which seriously thinned the goblin numbers. The truce was re-established.

Our initial foray cleared the first floor, but we had to turn back shortly after entering the second level. Some dueregar, a fireball trap, and another tribe of goblins (with a mage and fungi allies) were a bit too much for us. A torture chamber was opened and the half orc killed, although he raised the alarm that caused the deuregar to show up. They slaughtered our rescued human prisoners (Fargus and Sarah) whom were slightly ahead of us when they broke their invisibility. Jenks longtime henchman and torch bearer Doug was blown up by the fireball trap.

The map of level 1 of the dark crypt of kass the bloody. Entrance is in the top right, stairs down in the top left. One unmapped area between the goblins room and the storage hall (just north of the well of stars) that we couldn't access due to the goblin treaty.