S&W: Mad Overlord returns: The Plastic-Covered Hell

We started with the usual hour of random banter, which is frankly utterly awesome. We also discovered that our two fighters have the lowest Armor Class. Peter and I happened (or DID we?) to both wear red shirts.

We felt it was apropos.

Seriously – there’s absolutely no replacing the banter and bulls**t that happens when gamers and friends get together. Swapping old misinterpretations of DnD, discussing whose parents tried to help them game, and whose (ahem) tried to pry us out of the hobby with a crowbar.

Good time.

***

OK, now it was time to game. +Erik Tenkar brings the pain.

We get to it, with the traditional mocking of the 5% slope. It’s like a ritual.

We never did open up the doors to “room 160,” so freshly healed, we kick it in and go through. We find a room full of smoked fish, “meat,” and other stuff. Some sentient shishkabob. Alas – Donner, party of five. Four. Three.

We exit, and head down a corridor. There’s a door, and a number in the middle of the hallway. Which happen to be stairs.

We kick in a door, and find yet another room full of animal dung. Recent dung. We wade through it. Actually, there’s only a little dung.

We continue on, and find two lizard men with a series of small dinosaurs on leashes. It’s like a crazy dog-walking thing. But with velociraptors.

Immediately +Joe D casts sleep, and puts down four of eight dinosaurs. That’s a lot of velociraptors, plus two lizard men with whips and shortswords. Clearly Gor fans. Leather and creatures on leashes.

Rul misses, Mirado crits and injures himself, and +Tim Shorts casts another spell putting the rest to sleep.

We kill everything, naturally. The Lizard Man we leaave alive only speak Parseltongue. So we try and figure out what he’s saying, since Joe speaks so many languages that he can sort of understand him.

We make some qustionable moral decisions and move on.

After some meandering, always going right in honor of +Erik Tenkar being called the Rush Limbaugh of the OSR, We’re still pushing the poor Sleestak in front of us.

We find a teleporter. We bounce to some other location on the map. We head the only direction we can. We basically go somewhere and beg the GM to take us to something interesting.

We wander around some more, and finally arrive at a room with a faint phosphorous glow. The equivalent of torchlight, which ain’t exactly faint, but here we go.

We’re not surprised to find beetles. Four of them. We call them John, Paul, Ringo, and Bob. Poor sacrificial Lizard Man.

Joe casts Monster Summoning 1 just to muck with Erik. We roll to summon allies, but only summon 1 – but they only appear 10 minutes later. We decide that was a total waste of time, retconn the thing, and cast another web spell.

They’re trapped, so Rul riddles them with arrows. We burn ’em up, but there’s nothing worth keeping. Gah.

We keep going and find another fight. Six beetles . . . which become the targets of our first fireball spell. 5d6 for 23 damage (not bad!), and he deep-fat-fries three of six. Two of tje remaining are basically leaving body parts behind. They charge Joe, and roll 21, 21, and 16 vs a Mage AC 19 (!).

They nail him for two hits. Joe swings at one of the quite-wounded ones with his staff, killing one, cleaving, and then rolling a 20 for another! The last beetle misses. Rul nails for 6 HP with his bow, and Mirado hits hard.

We kill ’em all quickly, and find a body wearing plate – and the remains of a bone scroll case and a remains (burned thanks to Joe) of a scroll inside. And there used to be a pouch, with four gems, two shattered with the heat. Mirado ( +Peter V. Dell’Orto ) takes the plate with him (“isn’t he already wearing plate?” “It might be magical.” “Let’s mass-cast the spell at the end!”)

Again we return to wandering looking for new rooms. Old rooms are dead to us.

Oh, look. More beetles and-non-glowing fungus. Two beetles.

We win initiative, and Rul lets loose with an arrow, hitting but still up. Same with Mirado, 17 HP between the two. The freakin’ magic user wades into the fight. He does 3 HP, befitting a mage.

It’s +Tim Shorts‘ turn to roll a 1 . . . but he rolls 19 instead, and nails the beetle for 8 HP.

The quantum roller misses both

We  have a short series of awesome rolls, and kill everything in it, making beetlejuice. There’s a body of a fallen elf in it; Joe searches his fallen brother. 45 gp, 2 potions, and a longsword that glows when you touch it.


We establish that Rul gets all the magic swords, perhaps, needing a golf bag full of swords. We pass it around a bit, but nothing cool happens.

We find a few more beetles. We go after ’em. Mirado and Minster do 21 HP between them, killing one. A couple uneventful rounds pass. With a few hits here and there. Outcome inevitable. Searching the room, we find a nice mace. And a large locked metal chest. It contains 10,679 sp. We’re only 100 coins to the pound, so it’s only 100 lbs of silver.

We decide to seek out larger challenges, but we have no easy way to level 4. So we try and seek out some unexplored areas, looking to kick in doors and find a fight.

A room, a secret door, and onward! 10 skeletons charge! Rul changes to his 3-iron of undead slayage.

Minister rolls a natural 20, turning them all. Rul, out of spite, hits the dust with his sword of undead slayage. There’s a locked chest. Mirado examines the chest – rolls a 1 – and decides that the key to any chest is a f**king crowbar.

“How far away is everyone?” says the GM.

We gird our loins, and resist the Fear glamour on the chest. In the chest are 3,345sp, 2,428 gp, and 3 pieces of jewelry.

We continue on; there are a crap-ton of doors and we kick ’em all in as we can. We are endlessly confused by the one room in the entire dungeon without a room number, despite the presence of room numbers in hallways. We figure it’s some sort of Dungeon Zen Koan – if there’s a room in a dungeon with no number, can you kick in the door?

We find a room full of furniture with sheet on it. Each piece weighs about 200 lbs, and we hear the echoing sound of a child crying – and we find a kid’s skeleton. We enjoin Minister to perform Last Rites or the equivalent – which does nothing. Alas. We try and destroy the skeleton, but nothing helps. Apparently it’s possessed by the same spirit that occupies my infant daughter.

We find a rag doll on the floor. We’re not idiotic enough – no. We are. Minister gives the rag doll to the skeleton, which stops crying. We are NOT sitting on the plastic-covered furniture, though.

We kick in more doors. The room is decorated with a bas relief of frickin’ clowns.

Really?

OK.

We move on, and try and explore all the doors that enter into the interior of the room.

OK, more fungus in the first room. We close the door and leave. The GM assures us that’s the best thing we could have done.

We explore and explore, and finally hit a room where the actual room goes down a level. Guess we wanted to go down a few levels anyway, but now we’re on level 7.

We decide to wait a while, the room ascends. We find one room left, cause what could go wrong.

In this last, final, “what could go wrong” room, we see 50 empty earthenware jugs. We play beer pong for a while, then head back to town. And we do detect magic on our loot.

Plate armor isn’t magical (75gp). The longsword is +2, minor empathy power (unaligned, almost animalistic intelligence). The nice mace is not magical, nor are the gems/jewelry. Potions of invisibility and levitation.

The gems are worth 250gp and 500gp; the jewelry 300, 750, and 1,250.

Experience for rooms and killin’, plus loot, was well over, 10,000 XP. Nice.

Rul is at 6th level, +5 with normal weapons to hit. Not bad.

We end there.