On January 23rd, we held the third session of my Stonehell campaign. The really interesting thing about this session is that none of the three players present had played in the previous two sessions. Same continuity, completely different party composition.
Because the earlier party had already cleared the gatehouse and was working on the valley level prior to the holidays, I had a hired guide take this new group directly to the dungeon entrance. Between the holidays and a death in the family, my games had been on hold long enough that I didn’t want to waste time re-treading old ground.
There were supposed to be three other players as well - veterans of my Stonehell campaign - but one got sick, and the other two were stopped by the massive blizzard hammering Oswego County to our immediate north.
So this entirely new party - too poor to hire any retainers - went into the deep dungeon on their own: a fighter, a magic-user, and a thief.
They ran into a few weird things down there. No spoilers from me.
They had a pair of combat encounters. The first one they handled like pros: not a single hit point lost.
The second encounter was one they chose to initiate. They had a good plan, and they felt like they needed to push through that area to get where they wanted to go, following some vague directions they’d been given. But the dice turned on them hard. Their Orcish opponents passed three morale checks and dropped two-thirds of the party to exactly 0 HP, with the third character going down to around -2.
I ruled that the Orcs were impressed by the party’s fighting skills and attitude, and took them captive instead of finishing them off—intending to ransom them.
A few days later, the situation ended with a prisoner exchange at a neutral site.
I didn’t punish the magic-user for hitting -2, beyond giving him a cough. It is cold and flu season, and he’d just spent time in an Orcish jail. This is the one pass he'll get from me.
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