Warning: Potential spoilers below for the adventure, D0: Hollow’s Last Hope, from Paizo. Although it is not being used “as written,” spoilers may certainly be in the writeup below.
[This entry is from Rachel. All of the players, except for Todd, continued to play different characters than their normal ones (Rachel as Hervara, RJ as Ljot, and Robert as Olvir). As always, my GM comments in italics and brackets…however, I don’t really have a lot to add. At least not until the end.]
Olvir began speaking to the being in the shadows who said we killed its mates, and that it needed reparations before it would let us leave. It left the shadows and we saw that it was a large wolf, as it jumped onto a pillar and then down to the floor on two legs. It looked about 12 feet tall. At Olvir’s inquiry as to what reparations would be acceptable, the wolf said that Olvir could give him the man or woman human or make reparations by doing tasks. While giving the options, the wolf came closer to Sebbi and sniffed at him, very much enjoying the scent of Sebbi’s fear. Olvir responded that giving him the humans was not an option and asked about the tasks. Despite the wolf’s preference to have one of the humans to munch on, he did say that we could take care of the other creatures in this place and he would let us leave. He mentioned that he was not concerned about the creatures below, just those on this level. Olvir mentioned to the wolf that we had not wanted to kill its mates and were just defending ourselves, and that two of his mates were still alive in the next room. Olvir also mentioned that we were searching for mushrooms—the wolf scoffed at this and said there were no mushrooms here. Olvir said we would do the tasks the wolf requested, and he, Ljot, and Sebbi left the room, but not before the wolf again sniffed at and drooled on Sebbi.
[Who knew that playing the big bad wolf would be so intimidating to the players? It was hard, however, not to make some mention of a nice glass of chianti and some fava beans to go with the cracking of bones and draining of marrow. I’m not going to say exactly what the wolf was but some of you other Hellfrost GMs out there might have already guessed from its bipedal stance.]
We headed back to the big room where I healed Sebbi and attempted to heal Olvir. Unfortunately, I was not able to heal Olvir’s wound from the last altercation with the wolves.
We moved through the double doors leading off the room into a short hallway with a door on either side of it. The door to the left opened to a small room with a table with a metal cap/helmet on it. There was fungus in the room, but no visible mushrooms. When the others left the room, however, I picked up the metal helmet and found an ironbloom mushroom growing in it. I quickly plucked it out and showed it to the others before stowing it in my pouch. I was relieved to have found one, but would like to have at least 15 or so to take back to Askvold’s Stead.
The door on the right of the short hallway would not open, so we stepped into the longer hallway and moved to the left. Ljot opened a door on the left—the room had a table in the corner with two chairs. It looked as though we may have interrupted someone, as there was a half-eaten crow, a crude knife, and a cracked mug on the table. Ljot stepped into the room and noticed the tripwire just as he bumped it, causing stones and an anvil to fall from the ceiling and onto him. When it seemed that the stones were done falling, Olvir moved into the room and checked out the anvil and looked around the room but did not see any mushrooms.
There was a door off the side of the room, which Olvir and Ljot went through. There were 2 beds in the next room, disheveled and moldy-looking. Olvir looked under one of the beds and was attacked with a spear by the goblin hiding under the bed. The bed was upended and the goblin moved under the other bed. I entered the room and helped Olvir and Ljot attack the goblin. After we finally took him out, I was able to heal the injuries that Olvir sustained from the goblin.
We moved out of the bedroom into the hallway and through the door directly across the hall. The room appeared to be an old, very moldy library. The roof and wall were crumbled in one corner of the room, and part of the pool and waterfall that we had seen outside were now spilling into the room. Seeing a door to the side of the room, Ljot moved quickly to the door before we had a chance to really scout out the room. A large frog suddenly emerged from the water and grabbed Ljot with his tongue, swallowing him immediately. Olvir, who entered the room after Ljot, was grabbed and swallowed by the frog as well. After Sebbi and I made a few unsuccessful attempts at attacking the frog, I was finally able to hit it, and Sebbi was able to char it and finish it off. I cut the frog open as quickly as I could and we were able to pull the now slimy dwarves out. I tried to heal them but it was too late—the frog’s acidic stomach juices had been fatal for the Brighthammer brothers.
[This was a situation where I felt fully justify to blow my GM Bennies on offense. I almost always use them to reroll attacks rather than for soaking damage…unless it is a Wildcard opponent…but I felt particularly justified to spend away to hit with the first attack. Throughout the campaign so far, pools of water have been stressed as being dangerous (e.g., it was the “source” of the Velvetama that killed so many of Dalsetter’s residents). Despite this, RJ just had Ljot waltz through the room to the door on the far side with nary a care and no real backup. The giant toad missed on the intial attack, despite having the Drop, so I spent a Benny and then another and then another and then another. On that last one, both dice Aced…needless to say, the toad went gulp and Ljot went with it.
The rest of the fight was largely an exercise of poor rolls for the players. Despite the Toad having some watered down stats and despite Hervara’s attempts, both of the Brighthammer brothers appeared to be dead in the end. They weren’t actually…but I can’t go into that now because I don’t know if the players will be coming back to this location with their other characters or not yet.]
While I was trying to revive the dwarves, Sebbi searched some of the books and found a ruby sitting atop a book on top of one of the shelves. He handed it to me and I stowed it in my pouch with the ironbloom mushroom. Unfortunately we did not see any mushrooms in the library.
Sebbi opened the door on the side of the room, which Ljot had been heading to when the frog grabbed him. The door led to a chapel with stone pews knocked over on their sides and an altar at the front with an anvil on it. The altar appeared to have been defaced and damaged, but Sebbi still found five slight depressions in the altar that looked about the size of the ruby he had found in the library. We also saw a pile of slushy snow in the corner past the altar, which really looked out of place in here.
I followed Sebbi into the chapel, carrying the lantern so we could examine the room. As we looked at the altar, Sebbi suggested that the ruby might fit into the depressions, but before we could take a better look the slushy snow began oozing towards us and we started feeling colder. I smashed the lantern onto the slushy snow which stunned it briefly, giving Sebbi and me the chance to move back into the library and close the door. It was dark, but Sebbi was able to get his lantern out of his pack and light it. We watched for a couple of minutes and did not see the ooze coming under the door, so Sebbi suggested that we try to find out some information about it from the wolf. Before leaving the library, however, we made a couple of crude fire weapons with pints of oil and strips of cloth from the dwarves’ clothes.
[Take note: Hervara and Sebbi basically made a pair of molotov cocktails.]
We headed to the wolf’s area and Sebbi tried to ask it a couple questions, but he told us not to come see it until we had taken care of our task. We could hear that the wolf had retrieved the other two wolves from the room and that they were all together, so we decided not to press the issue for the moment.
We went back to the door off the short hallway that had not opened earlier—Sebbi tried to blast it open a couple of times but that did not work. He summoned his bodyguard and ordered it to break down the door, which it was able to do. It turned out that we could not open it because there had been a chair propped against the door. We found a desiccated dwarf corpse on the floor—it was clutching a piece of parchment in one hand and broken glass in the other. Sebbi carefully removed the parchment, but the writing on it appeared to be dwarven (which neither of us can read), so he stowed it in his pack. The shattered glass appeared to be from a vial. Their was a small silver hammer symbol on the corpse as well, which Sebbi also took. We did not see any metal or mushrooms in the room.
Since we had not yet checked out the room in the tower, off the big room, Sebbi suggested we head there next. There was a rickety spiral staircase leading up to a trapdoor, and the room was very dusty, filled with crates and debris, but with no metal or mushrooms. We carefully headed up the rickety staircase, and made it through the trapdoor to find a completely empty but very dusty room. We headed back down and out into the big room.
Having found nothing else that we needed to take care of, we went back to the chapel and opened the double doors. The slush oozed over to us very quickly and we retreated into the big room without closing the doors. Sebbi tried to cast fire bolts at it but was not able to do much. The ooze ended up engulfing me and the bodyguard. I tried to escape the ooze as I was beginning to suffocate but could not get out of it. I tried smashing our last lantern into the ooze just before I lost consciousness, but it did not appear to do anything.
Sebbi tried to cast fire on the slushy snow several more times but it did not work and drained him of his ability to use his magic. He and the bodyguard managed to drag Hervara’s body from the slush, but she was incapacitated and unable to help herself or Sebbi. Sebbi ended up being engulfed and suffocated by the slush, which caused the bodyguard to disintegrate and the slushy snowy ooze to grow even bigger. . .
[The encounters with the ice ooze–again a watered down, or perhaps melted would be a more apt term, version–was very frustrating. I really don’t know what was going on and it should have been a cakewalk for even just Hervara and Sebbi on their own. One good Fire Bolt or Molotov Cocktail would have taken it out. Instead of taking the fight at the ooze, the PCs played very defensively…for example, fleeing the first time. Then, instead of using the fact that it was apparently trapped in the room to their advantage by either letting Sebbi take his time preparing a Fire Bolt or just giving the Bodyguard a molotov cocktail and have it go in and smash the thing with it, they opened the doors and kind of panicked when it advanced “quickly” towards them (i.e., with a Pace of 4). In the end, the Molotov Cocktails remained unused and the party all lay dead.
I found all of this to be particularly demoralizing. Yes, there were some bad rolls on the night. Yes, Hervara’s “mundane” healing was more limited than magical healing (in that it can’t be attempted quite as quickly or as many times. But neither of those things, in my opinion, were the primary reason for the TPK. I really don’t mean this in a nasty way but the players, for whatever reason (and tiredness was one reason near the end), just kind of sucked this session. I guess some nights that just happens but when you combine it with the sucky rolls from the players all night, you get a bad result that I’m still bummed out about.
Oh well. Obviously, we stopped after the completion of the TPK. The Lord of Dalsetter is dead…not that anyone in Dalsetter knows it yet…and the Norns just clipped a lot of potential storylines. On the plus side, we have two new players joining the campaign this upcoming session and both are new to Savage Worlds. So, I’m going to run a bit of a mini-campaign, set in and around the Hrafn Point area of the Járn Vale…near the Withered Lands…to give them a taste of SW and Hellfrost before they “commit” to characters for the full campaign. The added bonus is that I can put off thinking about the implications of the TPK for a couple more weeks.]
