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Barbaric Week pt 3

This post carries on from my previous two posts.

Kane obviously has not made a huge amount of progress. He has killed a couple of ‘roaches with arrows and summoned his wolf companion.

He has lit a torch and is about to enter this first map section. Although I have specified giant insects as ‘monsters’, I imagine this cave is still filled with regular insects. The walls are crawling with them, and webs from spiders hanging from the roof. Every rock has centipedes and millipedes crawling around them.

Kane explores this first cave before making his way down the rock steps towards that first entrance way into a proper room (as opposed to a natural cave). This requires a couple more oracle rolls, but first, let us see what we can glean from the map image.

There is a statue to the right, Kane’s left. This appears to be a raised stage. All the steps seem to lead up to the raised area, and the octagonal island seems to be higher again. I am going to assume 5′ (1.5m) squares and say that the main raised area is 5′ or 1.5m above the floor, and the octagon is 10′ or 3m above the floor. That implies a high ceiling supported by the four pillars.

The map tells us nothing about threats. I assume that we cannot surprise anyone as we are carrying a flaming torch. This calls into question my choice of having Hunter as a trait in a game I always knew was going to be a dungeon crawl. I am going to take this opportunity to swap out Hunter for Hardy. Hardy reduced the damage on the first hit against Kane by 1D. This applies once per fight.

It is now time to turn to the oracle to breathe some life into the location. I want to know if there are any foes here? I think it is likely, so add DM+2 to the oracle roll. I rolled a 9, with the DM+2 becoming 11 and an Extreme Yes. Definitely foes here. I roll to see that danger level and get an 8 which is Dangerous. I roll on my d6 table and get a 6 which is Giant Spider. The spiders have an Endurance of 5, my danger level suggests a threat of 8-14. This suggests two giant spiders, but I rolled an Extreme Yes, so I put a third Giant Spider on the raised stage. I will put the others by the statue and another on the floor by the two pillars.

Is anyone surprised? We all make our stealth rolls, so there is no surprise. The Initiative order is Wolf, Spider, Spider, Kane, Spider.

I will spare you the rolling of all the dice in combat.

Well, that was disappointing combat. Kane failed to hit a single spider, He was reduced to just 1 Endurance, but the wolf was high rolling, getting multiple critical hits and killing all the spiders. Kane’s village would have been better off putting their faith in the wolf rather than Kane.

Healing Endurance is quite quick, it all recovers after 10 minutes, a bit like a 5e short rest. The question is, does Kane get 10 minutes of respite? That is an oracle question. I roll a 5, No, before Kane can catch his breath, something else enters the chamber. I roll on my tables and find that it is a pair of cockroaches that have come in through the cave entrance. This is awkward because I was thinking of retreating but they are between me and the exit.

Sparing you the combat, that was the second time that the wolf was by far the most dangerous combatant. Kane did kill one ‘roach, but it took way to long. I am having one of those days where I am struggling to roll above about 4 on 2D.

I repeat the process again, does Kane get to rest, and I get an No, again. This time it is a Lethal group of ‘roaches coming from the left hand exit. They have surprise! This does not bode well!

So far this time I have not needed any more rules, mainly because there has been little exploration and a great deal of slugging it out combat. I will see if Kane survives, and if so, what happens next.

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