Dschungelberg Session 007: It's Quiet.... Too Quiet...

     Extremely quick little excursion into the dungeon beneath Dschungelberg Keep with just me and my godfather, he rolled up with a party of 5 dudes:

- Olaf, Eckhardt, and Moldof the clerics

- Gavin and Claus the fighting-men

    Something that happens when you run the traditional dungeon-crawl for a single player controlling a party of characters is everything is more efficient. Without multiple cooks in the kitchen to mull and discuss about what to do next, things move very quickly. The crew entered the dungeon and spent 6 consecutive turns exploring, mapping the place out, and looking for monsters and treasure. They found none. They came across a staircase leading up, not to the main floor of the keep, but all the way up to a secret door into the master quarters, where they found Elf-Lord Barotha Carvalloman deeply inebriated and screaming for the guards "HELP ASSASSINS HELP HELP" 

    After being politely escorted back to the dungeon by some very tired looking guards the crew came across a room which was full of treasure, but also protected by a pitfall trap. Poor Eckhardt didn't make it. They decided to hide the treasure (6k in value) and venture down to the second level. I had not prepared the second level, so we engaged in some Appendix A on-the-fly dungeon generation. Another 4-5 exploration turns went by, not a single monster (Random encounters can be fickle dice!). It was downright eerie. 

    Finally, after much poking around, they came across 8 angry goblins in a long corridor. They fought valiantly, but after Gavin bought a farm they decided to bravely run away. They were pursued for a bit but managed to shake them (Still working out exactly how pursuit in OD&D is supposed to work...). The three survivors took their treasure and headed back to the surface, levelling up with the 3-way split of the treasure. The player was not sure what to do with 2000 gold laying around, and I suggested that one such use would be to hire some 200 men-at-arms for a proper wilderness adventure. We'll see what he does next week, but for now this was all we were going to do. 

    Simple, very simple, but I look at how much actual ground and exploration got covered in this 90 minute session and there is no doubt in my mind it would have taken a group of players 2 or even 3 hours to accomplish the same! What a single player lacks in the social pleasures of D&D, the table-talk, the kibitzing, the character dynamics, he makes up for in unity of mind and focus of play. Very efficient, but a totally different experience from running for 3-9 players as I typically do.