Dungeon Merlin
Run 2026/04/15 with 3 other players in person.
Characters present: Edmund Blackudder, Henrick Candleswick, Rowan Malksmilk
In-Game time covered: 8:00 AM of Hayme, 10th of Symswald - 6:00 AM of Frisk, 12th 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!
After clearing the cave in the woods containing a potentially valuable statue from the four Witch Owls that inhabited it last session, our heroes had slept (badly, for the most part) in front of the cave’s entrance. Today would be all about getting that 400kg statue out of the cave and back to Lankshorn. 1
Towards this goal, they first cleared any loose stalactites from the cave’s ceiling, and then realised they could use Edmund II’s “Floating Disc” spell to transport the statue for an hour. That would at least get it out of the cave. For the moment that it dropped, they constructed a skid to drop it onto.
On their way back to the Trothstones, they encountered their old friend the Carrion Worm again. Remembering that they could distract the worm with carrion, Rowan and Henrick went back to the cave to retrieve the owl carcasses. In the meantime, the time on Edmund’s floating disc ran out, and they now would have to drag the statue through the woods. The owls successfully distracted the worm, but dragging and pushing the statue quickly across the muddy forest floor didn’t work. They decided to tie the ropes they had brought around trees to construct basic tackles. This worked well, but meant slower progress.
They reached the Trothstones when it was already getting late, so they decided to camp there once more. During the night, the 5 shorthorn bandits Henrick and Rowan had avoided back in Session 3 returned — they seemingly had been stalking them. Edmund, who kept guard at the time, heard them early enough and the party quickly hid in the bushes surrounding their camp site. When the shorthorns reached their camp, Edmund put on his most gravelly voice and spoke into Rowan’s cooking pot to strike fear into their would-be robbers. Two of them actually failed their morale check at this point, leaving just three enemies behind.
In the ensuing fight, the party managed to kill two of them while sustaining only minor injuries themselves, leading the third one to flee the camp. Among the possessions of the two killed ones, they found a lot of the items that had belonged to Edmund I and Bin, confirming what they had already been suspecting — that these were the people who had robbed the small grave they had made near here where they “hid” these items.
Both Henrick and Edmund II didn’t manage to get a good night’s sleep. Again.
The next day, they used floating disc again, to move the statue up to the road leading to Lankshorn. Just as they were pondering whether they should really pull the skid for the ~15km until Lankshorn 2, a pumpkin farmer from High-Ankle came down the road, his horse-drawn cart full of pumpkins 3. They asked him if he would be so kind to come back for them and their statue, and he offered to do that for 50% of the statue’s value, which he believed would probably be 250GP. He even offered that they could pay him once the statue was sold. But the party was cheap, and let him ride off.
They managed to pull the statue about halfway to Lankshorn before it got dark, so they camped out near the road. In the night, they were woken up by an Elf wanderer running through their camp, begging them for help, and whispering:
“The Drune are pursuing me!” 4
DM Notes
If you are a player in this campaign, you probably want to stop here!
What Worked Well
- The players took very well to my logistics shenanigans and offered very intricate descriptions of their builds to pull all of this off. I loved that.
What Could’ve Gone Better
- Sessions such as this can naturally drag a bit (heh), and I think this one was no exception, especially towards the end. I was lucky that the encounters came up the way they did, loosening the session up a bit. It was also a very conscious decision on my part to play everything out the way we did, as I could’ve cut it short by not having the farmer be a greedy little weirdo. But I also wanted it to be a bit of a painful decision, which I think it was.
Footnotes
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I was actually very excited for a classic logistics session, and wasn’t disappointed. I just love hearing the plans and engineering solutions players come up with in these kinds of situations. ↩
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I based my estimate on the actual map here, realising that some of the descriptions in the book would not agree with this estimate. Even when just using the map, this was a slight over-estimate of the distance. That wasn’t on purpose though, but an honest misreading in the heat of the moment. It’s probably more like ~10km. ↩
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Pumpkins were the first thing that came to my head when the players asked if the cart would have space for the statue. I’ll need to come up with a reason why the farmer is selling his pumpkins in spring at some point. ↩
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This was entirely constructed using the encounter procedure. The example encounters from the Monster Book are an absolute life saver. I had planned on introducing the Drune anyways, since they are part of Edmund II’s goals, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so, so I picked that encounter from the Elf-Wanderer table. ↩