Pre-rolling, dragons, weird towns, and Schmuck Bait

Pre-rolling, dragons, weird towns, and Schmuck Bait

Hoo boy, very close to a TPK in last night’s Christmas/Solstice/Sol Invictus adventure. The party took all the schmuck bait.

In order to secure the church’s financial assistance for the coming war, the party’s lord lends them to Bishop Germanus. This crabby old dude sends them to retrieve a heretical book from a church in Saxon territory.

I pre-rolled all the random encounters, which worked super slick. I’m going to do that as much as possible from now on. The dragon mentioned in my previous post ate the horse the Amazon warrior had just traded a fine mail coat for, taking all her equipment except her weapons with her. The weather results were easily…weathered… with survival rolls from the ranger.

Reaching the town this church was in, they met the locals having some sort of festival. Atlas Obscura had an article about the Mari Lwyd, which is one of those supposedly ancient things that is actually fairly new.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mari_Lwyd so the locals are all dressed like this and it freaks out the party. But they explain they’re having a party and invite the PCs. They interact for a bit and pretend to be Christians. They ask if they can pray in the church, which is agreed to.

So, strangely unmolested, the party entered and quickly found a trapdoor to a basement. I’ve run 1000 Dead Babies for all the guys that were playing, but they’d never gone in the church basement, so I inserted that here. Worked perfectly. The party left all the easily findable magic items behind and wandered down a skeleton lined hallway to the room with the coffins. They were being so cautious. They open both coffins. In the man’s coffin, laying on his abdomen, is the book they’re looking for. They take it and nothing happens. I felt it was important I not penalize the party for taking what they were sent for. They didn’t have a choice about that and it smelled too linear to me. So there were no consequences for taking the book. They could have walked out. Each skeleton was wearing a necklace. They could have taken those. They could have smashed all the skeletons to bits and nothing would have happened. But they took the sword in the man’s coffin and then they did awaken all the skeletons. 30 skeletons. And then the wizard took the rose from the woman’s body and woke her ghost, a wraith. And they were fucked.

Luckily for the wizard, the wraith missed in the first round she was up. He had her rose. After a few rounds the wizard was life drained to 3hp and the ranger was dead. But just before the wraith could raise the ranger as a spectre, they killed her finally. But the skeletons had streamed in while they were concentrating on her and got to the archer at the back of the room. He went down and failed all his death saves. We’re using my houserule death and dismemberment table, and it turned out in their favor mostly, with two PC’s rolling well enough that they could get back in the fight. With two barbarians and a fighter left, they hacked up the remaining skeletons, but everyone was badly wounded.

They can’t take a short rest either, because we’re using the alternate rule that a short rest is 8 hours, and a long rest is a week in a safe location.

Outside, the townsfolk still wait. Or rather, the Mari Lywd do.

Oh yeah, they also just got done with Fish Fuckers and one of the PC’s doesn’t know he’s a hybrid. He jumped in the Pool of Bacchus (see 1000 Dead Babies) and will be pretty surprised in the spring when he gets the urge to spawn in a trout stream.