What Do I Know?

We started the second session of the new DCC campaign with a training montage.  The group had been picked up as apprentices to an established group of adventurers, so we played through a series of vignettes showing what kinds of things apprentice adventures would learn from their masters.

The group ran from dire squirrels while overloaded with their master’s gear while exploring the Halls of the Dreaming Wolf. They learned that dungeons tend to collapse once the final bit of magical treasure or boss monster is defeated, and dodged rubble on the way out of the Cairn of Cursed Corpses.  They attempted to not be destroyed by magical soundwaves when they got separated from their masters in the Room of Reflective doom, as hundreds of magical drums bounced their own words back at them.  They tried to concentrate on reciting a prayer in the depths of the Lost Temple of the Wailing God.

Finally, after months of adventuring, the party was given another task, that of heading out with various amounts of coins to pay off bills and taxes that the adventuring company had incurred over the past year.  The group ended up running from various creditors, and multiple members of the group decided that their apprenticeship was over and that they would just take the purses they were given and strike out on their own.

And a good thing they did, as when Eleanor, the former prostitute and current thief, decided to be semi-loyal and check in on their masters, she found out that the adventurer’s mansion had been burned down, there were no known survivors, and the tax collectors had claimed anything that might have survived the fire.

Now free but without a home, the adventurers almost to a man decided to try out the carousing rules using the purses that they made off with from their masters.

The next day a rich elderly merchant in the city sent out a messenger to find the adventurers, and managed to find Eleanor, who tended to be the most accessible of the young adventuring party.  The group gathered to hear the merchant’s pitch, a job that would take them to the Lost Graveyard, into a sepulcher that also happened to be the resting place for multiple items that allowed their user to cheat death.

The merchant was only interested in one, a chalice that would make him young and healthy for eternity.  After some threats and some negotiation, the party had their price, got some of their pay up front, and some of them went carousing again  (apparently that year of acting as apprentices caused some pent up frustrations to occur).

Zardock  (a wizard), Marcus  (a cleric), Eleanor  (a thief), Osborn  (a halfling), Chip  (another wizard), and Groot  (a ranger) all set out for adventure.  Before they left the city, they adopted a poor waif named Timmy as their very own apprentice  (one of the players forgot his character from the funnel, and snagged a new 0 level character for the night).

The trip to the Lost Graveyard was less exciting that a Judge might have hoped, but the actual Siege of the Graveyard made up for any lack of excitement.  Rather than try for any degree of subtlety, the group charged headlong at the Death Guard, priests of Death that tended the Lost Graveyard, announcing their arrival.

Soon Timmy visited their deity personally.

The Death Guard consisted of a Captain and four guards.  At the end of the fight, the Death Guard consisted of a Captain and three guards.

Thankfully, the gods were smiling on the battered, almost dead adventurers, and they had all very cleverly fallen into an unconscious state that was so convincingly death-like that the Death Guard carried their bodies to the staging area of the central sepulcher  (everybody was really lucky with their “recovering the body” rolls).

Inside the sepulcher the party began to awaken and found Raoul Something-Something De La Tormenta, an executioner that worked for the Church of Death, but had committed some sins that required his atonement, thus leading to his current posting  (Raoul replaced Timmy, and for the life of me I cannot remember nor read my notes regarding the Something-Something part of Raoul’s name, but believe me, every time his name was pronounced by Raoul, it was impressive).

Raoul may not be this cool, but his name is.

Raoul decided that the adventuring life might be for him, but the party couldn’t find any greater part of the sepulcher that led to hidden chambers rife with death cheating magic.  Then they tried the key that the old merchant had given them, and the doors at the back of the room, instead of opening into a small, empty, stone room, now opened into an extra-dimensional space wherein lay a larger dungeon complex.

Upon seeing a pile of neatly stacked and polished bones, the adventurers managed to exhibit the same wit and caution that had gotten them this far in their careers, and the mass of bones formed into a swarm of swirling, lacerating bone fragments.  The party battered the whirlwind of sharp calcium into submission, and began to contemplate where to go next, whereupon we ended the session.