Third consecutive session with the PCs staying in the dungeon. A bit more exploration and too much trust put on the wrong people…

3 hours session.

Gunderholfen by G. Hawkins: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/265629/gunderholfen

Player Characters (PCs) – The Dragon Brothers– guild roster:

Adventuring:

• Aracyne, Elf Hunter, fearless Guild Leader, (Isaac)
• Jedri, Ratman Thief, rather likes his curse (Isaac)
• Grimoire, Goblin Mage, frail but smart (Isaac)
• Torch, Goblin Knight, fanatically loyal to Forka, (Edmond)
• Trimbo, Human Arcanist, wields both crossbow and lightning (Edmond)
• Brondrack, Hatchling Dragon, rescued from the dungeon (Edmond)

Not adventuring at the moment:

• Bumwild, Gnome Mage, wants to become a summoner (Isaac)
• Letraquan, Human Necromancer, has a talking, evil sword (Edmond)
• Forka, Dogman Knight, fierce warrior (Edmond)

What the other adventuring guilds are doing:

• Green Imps: adventuring in Gunderholfen
• The Protectors: adventuring, not in Gunderholfen
• Widowmakers: adventuring in Gunderholfen
• The Musers: leisure in Longfelt
• The Ravens: adventuring in Gunderholfen

Main Goal for this session: explore a big chunk of Level 5

Gunderholfen – Level 5 East

• Having just killed a Cloaker, the PCs leave the Hall of Veneration behind and go into another unexplored section.
• Going south from the Main Thoroughfare, they enter a room with a mound of skulls. Poke Poke. They search, nothing, they leave.
• Next room is an old aviary, rusty cages and tiny bird bones. Trimbo puts a bird skeleton in his bag.
• Another room, an old storage, junk.
• Back to Main Thoroughfare, go south into a larger corridor, see that it’s blocked to the west by fallen rocks. They go further south into a narrower passage with a door at the end.
• Jedri opens the door. This startles the inhabitants, two dwarves who quickly regain their composure and welcome the adventurers, with six more dwarves joining them from adjacent rooms. The dwarves share their food with them, a bad stew with odd-tasting meat and stale bread. The dwarves are jovial but evasive in their answers. The adventurers ask if they could rest in the dwarves’s quarters later on and they’re happy to oblige.
• Thence, the PCs go explore another area, from the Main Thoroughfare again, a bit more to the west and north. They open a door into a very small room with another door but Jedri, as he steps in, is struck by a wave of pain. He gets out, letting Brondrack gets in with the same result and then again when he opens the next door into the next (small) room with another door. They decide to leave.
• They enter a room that is illuminated… by flaming skeletons. Fourteen with axes or spears, and six more with bows on a balcony above. Grimoire and Trimbo lob spells at the skeleton archers. Aracyne, Torch and Jedri protects them from the skeletons on the ground. The young dragon, immune to the fire from the skeletons, wreaks incredible havoc among them, stomping and tail-flailing until there’s not one left.
• The flaming skeletons defeated, they open a door into a room filled with ranks of standing (unmoving) skeletons, forty of them. The PCs simply close the door and go to the next one. It’s stuck but they force it open, revealing a small room full of dust and cobwebs. Searching leads to the discovery of a quiver of superior arrows, a bag of slong bullets and a potion.
• With that accomplished, the Dragon Brothers go at the dwarves to rest. They a have a room ready for them with three beds but they’re asked to leave Brondrack outside which the adventurers agree to.
• They’re brutally taken out of their sleep with a scream from Grimoire who’s just been stabbed! The dwarves are upon them with long knives! With armors off and weaponless, with Grimoire falling unconscious, the adventurers try to survive the traitorous assault. Fortunately, alerted by the ruckus, Brondrack come to the rescue, destroying the (now locked) door to the dwarves’s quarters along with the furniture that had been put behind. Three dwarves try to block his way but one Fire Breath from the young dragon sends them fleeing for their lives, on fire. Meanwhile, Trimbo has been hurt badly but Jedri, with much acrobatic skill has managed to get out of his bed, seize his weapons and offer much better resistance. The appearance of Brondrack turns the tide on their favor and they kill the five dwarves, with the three others havind fled away from the area.
• Death reveals the true froms of their assailants, the dwarves were in fact dopplegangers! Grimoire is alive, is healed back to consciousness but has a concussion and a pierced lung and can’t cast spells at all in this state.

Closing Comments:

• I must say, I have a tendency to roll my eyes when I see dopplegangers in oldschool modules. There’s the Gotcha factor that they imply but also they’re just too prevalent for me to find them believable. But my boys were wholly unfamiliar with them and really got caught by surprise. We’ve talked together afterward about the clues, not too overt but they were there, about the fact that something wasn’t quite right about the whole thing.
• And to my own surprise, they loved it! They liked the tenseness of the situation coming from this strange turn of events. And surviving it too, of course.
• Waking up meant in this case succeeding on an awareness roll with bane (disadvantage). The PCs each have pretty high awareness by now so only one failed regardless of the difficulty. The dopplegangers succeeding on their sneaking still meant a free attack and a lethal free attack to the sleeping Grimoire. Somewhat lenient as a process but not sure they would have survived without their dragon.