Boys & D'nD, session 3

We didn't manage to play last Friday, so I played with the boys on Saturday, instead. Their mother wasn't feeling well, so she went to bed and left me to run her character (as well as the game).

After some opening consultation, the boys decided to take their treasure back to town and sell it. It was evening by the time they got back, so they returned to their houses, slept, and met up again in the morning. TheyHead Watchman Vendik agreed that they needed to finish exploring the ruin to make sure that there were no more threats down there. He offered to send a couple of guards to watch over the farmhouse while they made their explorations, and had the quartermaster equip each of the three characters with a pair of healing potions.

With that settled, the characters set off to the market and sell their loot -- mostly equipment that they took off the goblins. Most of it is sized for small humanoids, so the humans and elves that make up the majority of the town won't be able to use it; but there are small communities of both Halfling and Gnomes here, and in any case the merchants can always find a market for decent steel.

Note to self: I need to figure out how much they got for those weapons. One of the things they don't warn you about when you agree to be the Dungeonmaster is the amount of time you'll spend on that kind of prep-work and follow up. It's somewhat like being a teacher: the time you spend with the class isn't anywhere near the whole of your workload.

Anyway, the trio returns to the ruins and enters again. They stay on the top level this time, scouting down a couple of passages that they'd ignored last time in favor of the ramp. One of them has openings onto three mid-length, dead-end passages that turn out to be some sort of catacombs. Secondborn (seven years old, playing a Human Ranger/Rogue 2/2 character) goes down one of the passages, noting the skeletal remains tucked into the shelves on either side. At the end of the hall he finds a square stone block (not unlike the one in the temple they found last week, but much smaller) with a rolled-up bit of cloth or paper on the top. (It's covered in dust, so it's hard to tell.) He leaves it alone and goes back to report to the others, and I refuse to hint at whether this was an opportunity missed or a disaster avoided.

Proceeding on, the group turns a couple of corners and then encounters a doorway with soft white light coming out of it. It isn't firelight, but it's a little brighter than the light created by the lichens on the lower level. They move carefully to the door, and discover the mushroom garden: the room inside is a large square. Unlike everything else they've found so far, the floor is dirt. Neat rows of mushrooms grow -- and glow -- in the darkness. These are quite large, varying from the height of our table to the height of the kitchen ceiling (about seven feet, or a bit over two meters). Careful inspection reveals that small feet - probably goblins - have been walking up and down the rows on a regular basis, and that the mushrooms have little squares cut out of them.

The group exited the garden and proceeded on to discover the goblin bedroom, which contained some odd square fungus-beds with ugly old blankets on them. The room also contained a small chest, which Secondborn opened on his second attempt. The chest contained 2GP, 24 SP, and a particularly nice shortsword. Further examination by Beautiful Wife's character reveals that it's a Shortsword +1. There was also a vial of purple liquid of some order. Secondborn promptly claimed the sword for his character.

The characters haven't noticed yet, but if they keep this up they're going to be rich enough to make some of the merchants rightly nervous.

The group then explores the rest of the rooms, finding four of them empty, two of them overgrown by the fungus-mattresses, and one serving as a sort of large closet. Since it was getting into evening by then (even though they were underground & couldn't tell) the group elected to bed down in the goblin bedroom.

I stopped them there, because I was exhausted and not feeling entirely well myself, so it was a short game and they didn't actually kill anything. They were a little disappointed by that, but I think they'll find more action this weekend.