Solo RPG Campaign - 4. Morlock of the Opera

Dates below are in-game time, that probably synch-up (more-or-less) with the first day on which I began playing, but I often take more IRL time to play sessions than the amount of in-game time that passes. Nevertheless, I am still focusing on keeping my sessions relatively short, and ending them back in town. 

2/23/'24

Even though Edelweiss took a week to recover from losing a finger in the last session, I was still able to fit a second delve into the month of February. During downtime, Chadonius looks to purchase some better armor, but since Sapperton is a class VI market (the poorest), it will have to be imported. A set of chain mail will arrive in 10 weeks (May 3rd). Since Radnor has the Healing proficiency, he buys some herbs. However, the Horsetail herb will also need to be imported, and will arrive in 11 days (Mar. 5th). This is an interesting result of using 1:1 time in combination with ACKS' market scarcity rules -- not everything is immediately available, or available in sufficient quantities. At least not in this small village. My characters may not be in time jail, but the purchased equipment is.

2/24/'24

The party leaves town and marches out to their "standard" campsite as usual. I roll a night time encounter with three Monsterous Attercops (4HD each). As I was trying to follow the procedures exactly as defined in the rules, I rolled the percentage chance for them to be "in Lair" and discovered that my party was indeed camping in an Attercop lair. Now, a lair is generally stationary and therefore unable to encounter a party while it is camping. However, I don't see any explicit rule in ACKS to not check the chance in-lair while camping, even though in retrospect, it seems patently obvious that you shouldn't. 

At this point, I had to stop to back up for a second in order to think about how to adjudicate this. If the party's usual campsite near the dungeon had been recently taken over by Attercops and turned into a lair, it would make sense that they would at least have a chance to notice this before bedding down for the night. My Halfling Scout, Edelweiss, who is still using the BFRPG rules, has a Tracking skill, and generally operates in advance of the party, so I let her make a tracking roll (which was successful) to see if she would've noticed the webbing before setting up camp. I also rolled surprise for the Attercops, and they were surprised, so she was able to sneak away without being seen, and she informed the party that they would have to find a new campsite that night. Thus no further encounter occurred.

2/25/'24

The next day, the party returns to the shrine and descends into the dungeon beneath. Jelyssa listens at the eastern door to hallway #7 and hears nothing, then she listens at the door to #9 and hears nothing. She methodically searches the door for traps and finds nothing. After opening the door, however, an automatic hasty search reveals a trip wire inside the door connected to a whipping thorn branch trap, which she activates with her 10' pole. Since the room is somewhat large and empty, I roll up some dungeon dressing from the Sandbox Generator, and discover that the room has an organ along the far wall. Which of course, means that there is a stage in front, and the rest of the room has pews for a good ol' fashion Old Time Revival. The room also contains treasure: 9,000 cp, 3 ornamental gems (worth 25 gp each), yielding a total value of 165 gp.

While they are divvying up this treasure, a wandering monster check comes up positive. A single deformed and misunderstood Morlock with a spear and hide armor has entered the south end of the room, near the organ. A reaction roll comes up undecided, so he remains hiding in the shadows, watching the party. The party continues to advance south into the room. A second reaction roll remains neutral as the party approaches to within torchlight range. Radnor and Jelyssa are surprised, but the rest of the party isn't. Edelweiss wins initiative, as usual, and shoots first. A short combat later, and the party has killed the poor creature, netting 10 XP.

This encounter was something of a mistake. Given that the creature was alone, and not hostile, it posed little risk to the party. What I should have done was had Marzipan use Beguile Humanoid (ACKS' version of Charm Person) to  press the Morlock into service. Marzipan hasn't cast a single spell in the game yet, and this would've been a good chance to do so. The Morlock could have walked in front of the party to trigger traps, or he could have carried treasure for them as a porter. Alas, it was not to be because of Edelweiss' itchy bowstring finger.

Behind the organ is a door to a small empty room where the Morlock had apparently been holed up. It seems apparent that he was also the one who had set up the whipping branch trap on the door. He probably liked playing the organ in his spare time, the poor guy... The party returns to the north end of the room, and Jelyssa methodically searches the eastern door for traps, and listens, but finds and hears nothing. However, the party has been in the dungeon for 50 minutes now, so they spend the next ten minutes resting and deciding where to go next. 

They decide they will head back out into the hall and see where the intersection leads. Before they can exit the room, yet another wandering monster is indicated: 5 giant centipedes. Rather than interrupt the party's rest, I place them outside in the hallway, where they will encounter them upon leaving the organ room. However, doing this makes me question the encounter distance rules, which say to reduce the encounter distance to visual range (60' in lightless conditions for the centipedes, which is twice the party's torchlight radius). This may work for when the monsters approach a stationary party in an open room or corridor, but when they're moving through a door, there's no reason that the centipedes would be at exactly that distance at the point when the party exits the room. By overspecifying the calculations (in this case, for encounter distance) rather than relying on abstractions, the rules seem to once again place me into odd corner-cases, which seems to be a running theme that leaves me second guessing the rules.

Edelweiss and Chadonius are not surprised, and end up winning initiative, but since they have not sensed the centipedes yet, all they can do is ready their weapon. This is another odd but deliberate corner case in the ACKS II rules, where a character can get an "intuition" about the presence of an enemy, by not being surprised and winning initiative (even without having sensed the enemy). It took me a while to realize that this rule applied to this situation, because the placement of the rule in the draft I was working off of implied that it only applied when a character was using the Sneaking proficiency. I believe this placement has been corrected in a later draft.

The conflict with the centipedes itself goes pretty quickly. In the first round, Edelweiss and Chadonius take out three (including a cleave). The remaining two centipedes fail to connect with their victims, and are finished off in the second round before they can do any damage.  5x6 = 30 XP.

Heading north to the crossroads, they choose to go left (west) and after 60' they come to a set of stairs heading back up to the surface. This exits through a hidden trapdoor somewhere outdoors, behind the back of the shrine (I don't have the surface mapped). Although the delve has only lasted an hour and 20 minutes and the resulting XP is a paltry 205 (split 5 ways), they have already had two encounters and are weighed down with a pile of copper, so they decide to head home. (Also, I was running out of time to play).

2/28/'24

As it is the end of the month, the party pays its living fees (25gp), paying as much of it as possible in copper.