Hex Crawl 23 #139: Robbers in Dassu's Shadow

 Six hexes north, three northeast of Alakran.

 

In a half-cave hidden at the end of a twisting badland canyon, you may find at ease a company of bandits numbering eight-and-declining. They are tough enough to rough up a merchant with four cheaply bought guards, but flee if they see more than one chariot coming at them. 

Their leader is the young-looking, but old-eyed, Shar the Breathing (rogue-7). On his dark throat the pallid welts of ten gripping fingers are branded. If you object that his epithet can be said of all living men, he replies, "It does not apply to most men who have bedded a she-demon, one who went by Tahasta -- no, not a 'she-demon in bed', a she-demon." The other bandits are fighters, rogues and one ranger, levels 2 to 5.

While Shar and his associates scorn the piety of Halpashulupi, they have ended up doing the work of his cause. This is because the main sources of wealth to prey upon after the collapse of Dulsharna have been the trade caravans of Gheenatru, laden with corpse- and slave-picked dates and pomegranates. Recently they have become more bold and attack the slave trade itself, the demonaic flesh-traders who occupy the ruined town of Ugulzat in the hills to the south and east, and bring wretched people from the despoiled central valley westwards to Gheenatru.

Their riches are buried in three urns around their camp - one of 200 gold and 4000 copper, one of 500 gold and 2000 copper, and one of just 1500 gold. They intend to offer up these treasures as ransom for their lives should they be bested or ambushed. 

As well, Shar possesses the Javelin of Certitude. At the moment when the sun's rays first appear in the sky, one may use the tip of the javelin to write a grid in the dust with no more than four alternative answers to a question requiring an INT or WIS based skill to answer. The grid must stay until the rays of the sun disappear from the sky, and then when the javelin is thrown at the grid, if it strikes an AC equal to the DC of the question (rolled in secret), it will hit the answer that is true, else it will hit a random wrong answer. Shar's band uses this artifact to stay one step ahead of the opposition.

 

Running Bandits Across the Many Worlds

Well, I couldn't get much enthusiasm to blog during my trip in the latter half of January (especially when my computer's hard disk crashed) but did get in a fair amount of tabletop action. Stick with it, there's some more commentary on megadungeon design below ...

My first stop was the gaming in-laws (previously) where my wife rolled up her third first level magic-user with a Sleep spell to venture into the Castle of the Mad Archmage - promptly dubbed "Repetitia." Thus augmented, the usual family party set out to defeat the Skull Stacker bandits in the upper works, led by the green-armored terror, half-orc Grunya (or Grainne - medieval orthography being what it is). This would be the third time the Skull Stackers have appeared in my various parallel universes - the first time in the long-ago Trossley campaign, the second in the Saturday games I ran last year for the local game club.

Accompanying the party was a detachment of the local guard, pushing ahead of them three convicts from the rival bandit gang captured in the previous session. The convicts were chained to polearms and told that their way to mercy was to attack without regard for life.

There followed a tense battle across a curtain wall and tower with scaling of walls, dodging and not-dodging of arrows, opening of one door from within and another door using Repetitia's enlarge/reduce spell on the planks. Dad and daughter climbed a grappling rope to find Grunya and comrades atop the tower while son and the rest of the party battled up from within the tower, landing a critical hit on the leader at the best possible moment to knock her down the stairs. Soon she was dead and the young version of the rival bandit Fergus, who had appeared in Grunya's respawned band when the Castle reappeared, was in custody. Shades of Looper! The captive older version of Fergus offered his own life to hang for the crimes of both if younger Fergus could be indentured to the party as a man-at-arms - very different from how this dilemma played out in Trossley.

The next day, the party, now mostly second level, decided to return to the Castle's dungeons and head down the rightmost of three stairs to level 2. After disposing of a spider they found themselves in a hallway occupied by ... not bandits ... okay, brigands. A quick sleep spell disposed of most of the band and in short order they were negotiating surrender terms with the leader, Tov Encher. Tov convinced them that only he could pacify the neighboring troglodytes who had come to investigate the sounds they heard, and so got them out of the level, and set himself free at the price of the gang's treasure.

It's only after running the brigand episode that I realized this was another example of Joe Bloch's hidden depths beneath the Castle's terse descriptions. (I've previously noticed some subtle setups running the west end of the second level, where a seemingly unbeatable monster has the means to defeat at hand, and a fear trap combines with branching corridors behind it, to effectively split the party.)

The group of about 12 brigands lives in a series of 20x20 foot rooms off a straight hallway behind a door, close to the stairway down. To quote:

BLACK SPEAR GANG (#35 – 40). A group of brigands has taken up residence with the idea of ambushing adventurers after they are weakened. They have not been very successful of late, and will often send out patrols to look for likely targets, setting up ambushes, etc.

This is where it pays to read ahead of time and embellish the dungeon. My one idea was that they would try to dissuade adventurers from entering their area, instead shunting them to the nearby troglodyte-controlled corridor, which would easily yield a weakened party for the ambush idea. Therefore, I had the brigands put the delver's rune for "Treasure" on their own door, which obviously (?) would make parties suspicious and choose the other door. However, nobody in the party managed to decipher the rune, so in they went.

The fallback plan for the brigands, in hindsight, would be to put bars or blockades on the inside of the doors, hope the party would bypass the unmovable doors to venture deeper within, and then ambush on return. But DMs, like players, have to live and learn.

Personally, I think working with the design of the dungeon to bring out strategies like this is a fun challenge. But I can see how a product for less experienced session runners might gain value by going beyond the minimal descriptions, and spelling out some of the more interesting possibilities that might not be immediately obvious.