There’s no sugar coating this…we had a TPK in this session. Jen was missing and so was Clara and all healing for the party. After some further exploration, the party came to a chamber with pillars and many–large–spider webs. As they were cutting their way through these webs, Jano and Korgath got into a bit of a shouting match (about something I don’t even remember at this point). Unfortunately, this alerted a guard post in the next chamber, separated by just a short corridor from the party’s location. Those guards then alerted their companions beyond as this area was the stronghold of one of Stonehell’s factions.
More details below the break.
The party pressed forward and started to be shot at from the darkness beyond their light by the alerted guards. This sort of sniping had happened to the party previously to the party in a prior session. In this prior encounter, the bad guys stayed just out of the light and kept shooting at the party so Brielle rushed in this time. A combat ensued. Sadly, the bad guys had already been calling up reinforcements out of their stronghold. The loss of a couple of their compatriots drove the rest into a bit of a frenzy. They just kept coming and by the time the party elected to retreat, it was simply too late. The party was defeated.
I’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about how to deal with this. One option, of course, would be to continue with Clara and a new party. Another option would be to just start fresh again. Another would be to let the implications of this TPK play out. But then I started talking with one of the players about what had happened. As we talked, he came to the conclusion that he was just going to have to get used to his characters dying. That was close to but not quite the polar opposite of what I thought I was communicating and so it got me to thinking more.
I came to the realization that while I was trying to say that maybe you should consider how your play is leading to this consequence (death of a character), the player was just telling me that they just need to get used to that consequence. I hadn’t really thought about it yet, but this fit. So far, it seems like the players have just been wandering about without any real purpose or any real concern about consequences. For example, once they got into Stonehell proper, they had a map leading to a treasure. They never really made any effort into following this map (it was straight from the entry chamber to another location on the 1st level). When they had the objective of finding something called “da Spa,” they pretty much wandered about with no real purpose again…exploring nearly everywhere around “da Spa’s” location but not that location. Literally going full circle around “da Spa’s” location without finding it.
It got me thinking that Stonehell is not the style of game for these players. Rather than seeing Stonehell as a dangerous location to explore, I think it is being seen as just a place to run around devil may care. All that is going to do is lead to more character death, more restarts, and more work for me to restock the dungeon or otherwise deal with the consequences of this style of play. I don’t think I want that. So it is goodbye to Stonehell.
So we will be starting a new campaign in our next session…something from the Merry Mushmen…that I’ve been wanting to play since I got my hands on it. It is a sandbox style adventure with a central goal to ultimately be accomplished lest the town of Ragged Hollow be no more.
