Reflections on a Session: 22 October 2016

• Time spent: 5 hours
• DMing: 3 hours
• Presession, including food: 2 hours
• No new areas mapped
• Two rooms restocked / reorganized
• Dungeon areas explored:
• Pox's Camp, now Scabies' Camp - friendly, traded
• Two new weak / vermin lairs, cleared
• Giant mosquitos
• Giant mosquito larvae
• One monster room (giant beetles)
• Re-explored three rooms in the Spider Zone
• Game-time elapsed in dungeon: ~3 hours over two expeditions
• Lost count of random encounters checked
• I rolled like two random encounters during negotiations with ratmen in a fairly safe place, wasn't sure how to play those out so I skipped them
• One random encounter that did fire was with the Seven Dwarves (NPC adventuring party of dwarves), right as the players were re-entering the dungeon on the second expedition
• Party composition:
• Scarth, MU 2 (leveled to 3rd)
• Slagathor, Chaotic Cleric 2
• Rheingold, Cleric 1
• Thancharat, L0 man (leveld into Elven Enchanter - secretly an elf all along?)
• ??? the Lizardman, Thrassian Gladiator 2
• Ascila, L0 man (leveled into Bard)
• Wardok, War Dog
• Dogeater, 1HD ratman hero with good stats, hired at Scabies' Camp.  Not allowed out of the dungeon, so stays at Scabies' Camp between adventures.  Relationship with Wardok: tense (it'd be a pretty even fight).
• Mortal wounds taken: 0
• I think I only did 3HD of damage the entire session :\
• Loot recovered:
• Traded a light ballista to Scabies for a ratman potion of healing, which they then sold to the Five-Finger Discount (NPC party of 5 sneaky-classed characters)
• Nothing bad could come of this
• Recovered around 2700gp in gems from the vermin lairs
• Identified Pox's potion as a Potion of Poison
• Traps triggered: 0
• XP from monsters: 382
• Waaay over the 4:1 ratio here
• Help I can't delete this bullet point

Other notes:

Very short-handed today, but both players were old stalwarts.  They recruited a bunch of expendable henches and did a good job of picking low-risk fights and fleeing from high-risk lairs.

We played initiative correctly today, to devastating effect for the mosquitos.
We did allow leveling of L0 mans into very non-standard classes, but that was by design (those statblocks were not meant for fighters).

Between elaboration on the Machine In the Black Sky above the rat-dimension, and meeting the same crusaders that they killed during the first session (who wanted the +3 sword back), the party is starting to get concerned about the nature of the dungeon.  Excellent.

Matt's lizardman is a killing machine.  18 Str, 13 Dex, a +3 sword, and 3 points of natural armor...  AC10, THAC0 ~4+, and 1d10+7 damage at 2nd level.  At least his Con isn't great and his HP are around expected value...  Still, he is going to be a hard guy to kill.  Between Inhumanity, the party's reputation in town for high henchman mortality, and a Slander result while trying to hire a guy, I suspect Dogeater is not the last beastman henchman he's going to have.

Speaking of which, I am pleased with the party's entrance into ratman politics.  If Against the Wicked City's party is underworld conquistadores, mine was more like Englishmen selling rifles to the natives this session.  The Brittonian South Ratistan Trading Company, or maybe Underworld Armament Imports, Incorporated.

I am a little concerned that my players did basically what I had hoped they would do this session.  I do not know if this is because they did a good job of reading me in play, or because I did a good job of modeling them beforehand.  Something to think about.