Dungeon Merlin
Run 2026/04/08 with 4 other players in person.
Characters present: Bon Go, Edmund Blackudder, Henrick Candleswick, Rowan Malksmilk
In-Game time covered: 8:00 AM of Colly, 8th of Symswald - 8:00 AM of Hayme, 10th of Symswald
Player-Safe Session Report
If you are a player in this campaign, don’t click on (or scroll to and read) the footnotes!
Our heroes woke up in the stables of Bogway’s, Lankshorn’s local watering hole for horses and adventurers alike. From here, they headed first to the Hornstoat’s Rest Inn, to freshen up, and then straight to the funeral procession for their friends and a man called “Dayle Snudgewick”. It was a day of pouring rain. Everyone started at the marketplace, and then made their way to the cemetery, with the curates carrying the caskets.
When they were almost at the cemetery, a large murder of crows began harassing them. A fire-arrow by Bon didn’t quite hit its mark, wasting all the oil he had used to engineer the arrow. Henrick instructed a few brutes to investigate where the crows were coming from — a few bushes just on the other side of the cemetery. While the brutes were away, the rest took shelter in Father Dobey’s vicarage just outside the cemetery gates. Crows kept flying against the windows, when the brutes arrived with the carcass of a devil’s goat in the late stages of decomposition, telling them that they had found it in the bushes.
The carcass seemed to attract the rest of the crows, and it was now hard to see outside the windows, due to the sheer number of crows surrounding the vicarage. This was when Edmund II used his Vapours Of Dream spell to put a large portion of the crows to sleep for an hour. The rest dispersed, and the “heroes” murdered the remaining crows in their sleep. Rowan decided to trap one in a box and take it with him, and Bon took a dead one — y’know, just in case.
After that, they went on to bury their fallen comrades.
In the afternoon, it was time for Henrick’s Pragmaphon study group. Here, he managed to convince 3 religious zealots and 1 regular person to join permanently, as well as 2 people who were still “uncertain” whether they would return. 1
The rest of the time was spent buying a few things in preparation for returning to the owl cave where their friends were slain to retrieve the statue and maybe, finally, gain some serious gold and XP in the process.
When the group arrived at the Trothstones the next day, they saw that the small “grave” they had dug for the items they couldn’t carry had been robbed in the meantime. Continuing on through the thick undergrowth, they encountered a Carrion Worm, which Bon Go managed to distract with a dead crow he had taken with him during the mass murder of crows the day before.
At the cave, they spent the afternoon felling trees to construct what was basically a wooden portcullis to trap the owls inside the cave. They then built a fire in front of it to smoke them out. And finally, they took their sweet time killing them one after the other with Bon’s bow from a safe distance as they tried to flee the cave. 2
Before going to bed, they took a look at the statue and realised that it wasn’t of Saint Pastery, but the more obscure Saint Nuncy — was this even the right cave? 3
Finally, they decided to camp out in the cave’s entrance for the night, to both protect the statue from any thieves and themselves from the smoke that was still lingering inside. Since both Henrick and Edmund II didn’t have bedrolls, they had to roll to see if they were getting any sleep. They didn’t.
DM Notes
If you are a player in this campaign, you probably want to stop here!
What Worked Well
- There was a lot of conflict in this session, but no combat and not a lot of rolling dice. The players took a lot of time preparing and thinking through situations, and I tried to present the situations as problems to be solved by other means. This is something I’m still trying to get better at, but I felt it worked pretty well this session.
What Could’ve Gone Better
- I still find it very hard to find escalations for situations and problems that make sense and don’t feel random. I want to reward problem solving, but also don’t want to resolve every situation immediately. This is a very fine line to tread, since I also try to be as blorby as possible most of the time. I don’t want to make anything up in the moment just to keep the pressure on. But my players are all super clever, which can lead to situations that resolve almost immediately.
Footnotes
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Here, I decided to re-use the rules for recruiting retainers pretty much 1:1. I did a bit of research into other rules for starting groups, and thought I’d maybe use the rules for projects from Worlds Without Number, but decided to keep it simple in the end. I’m not 100% sure where this will lead — or if it will lead to anything — but this way we can do some influence based on number of members in the future when Henrick should decide to challenge Father Dobey or something like that. ↩
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I thought about introducing some complications here, but decided against it. They spent a lot of time preparing and then describing how they made sure that everything was safe to execute, and I really wanted to reward this, as this is the goldilocks zone of play for this kind of system I feel. ↩
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Yeah, it was, I just done goofed in a previous session and told them the wrong saint. ↩