Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 5638992" data-attributes="member: 1210">We played another session of this last night. The party was still trapped in a dungeon, deeper than is healthy for 1st level pcs. Previously, one pc had fled the fiendish manticore and made it up a level, past some monsters that she outran, and to a goblin tavern (the Unbroken Leg). That player missed this game, so she sat in the corner of the bar the rest of the time.The other survivors (who'd slept through the deadly manticore encounter) woke up, met up with a couple of replacement pcs (who had been scattered through the dungeon in an earlier encounter with a crypt thing- hurray for me having an easy justification for new pcs in the dungeon!) and tried to find their missing compadres. There was a bunch of exploration before they found a room dominated by a huge statue of an ax-wielding troll. The wizard went in and poked around; after a few moments, the statue boomed out "DAR!"The wizard hemmed and hawed, and after frittering away a round, the axe swung and cut the wizard cleanly in half. Whoops!One of the other pcs ran in, grabbed the wizard's upper half and dragged it towards the entry. "DAR!" the statue boomed, and the living pc dropped the half-body and bailed. After a moment, the statue swung its axe.After a few wary minutes, the pc went back in and finished retrieving the head-and-torso. It only took a few seconds; this time, the statue didn't attack. Meanwhile another of the pcs had recognized that the statue seemed to always swing horizontally, so he "did the centipede" across the room to where there were two more doors. The other pcs hesitantly followed, staying against the wall but upright. After a moment, the statue did its thing again and demonstrated that the guy doing the centipede was the smart one; the other two got attacked (but survived) while the axe whistled over the centipede-doing guy's head. The two doors out proved to lead to the fiendish manticore, who was eating a dead pc's face, and to a mostly empty room, where the party escaped to, closed the door, healed and rested again. Then they moved on, unwittingly retracing the steps of the last session's survivor. They didn't get as far as she did without an encounter, but when they did stop for a fight, they cleaned up quickly while taking minimal damage. We ended as they spied their companion in the Unbroken Leg (the tavern). Notes: The pcs haven't gotten jack for xp yet; they have consistently forgotten to search after combats, so they also haven't gotten much treasure. D'oh! The statue is intended to be easily avoided but fairly lethal if you don't avoid it; it worked just about as intended. There are several clues to the statue's deal in the room containing it as well as the room before it, but the pcs missed them. There was a lot of beer involved, which may have degraded the party's normal level of wariness and level of play just a bit. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification