June 22, Saturday, continued - After the fight with the bugbears last session, the party continues down the hill toward an area of large ruined buildings. Crumbled colonnaded facades have the group guessing that these were temples or other important buildings (which becomes obvious).
Approaching the ruined temples, a trio of odd birdlike creatures are seen feasting on the remains of a bugbear. The creatures prove to be cockatrices, which can paralyze a person for a period of time. A brief fight ensues, mostly using magic and ranged weapons, and the creatures are easily disposed of.
Exploration of the above ground part of the ruins follows, and a few valuables are found, including a small stash of treasure from an earlier adventuring party. Stairs are found leading down.
The party explores the first section of what appears to be a continuation of the above ground temple ruins - there are crypts and shrines and burial vaults.
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| First dungeon in full modular tile set up |
A basilisk is encountered and killed surprisingly easily. Nobody gets turned to stone (awww!).
Next time - continuing the dungeon.
GM Commentary - It was pretty much all exploring and dungeon crawling this session, and it's a nice change of pace to mix story sessions with old school combat oriented sessions. More dungeons next time. I'm continuing to learn that dungeon crawling is slow and time consuming, and I need to gauge the time needed for "x" amount of dungeon exploration better. Any time dungeon crawling is a part of a session (or a whole session), I tend to grossly overestimate what we will be able to cover in an evening...
It is also noteworthy that this dungeon was the first where we have transitioned completely from paper and tokens to terrain and minis. What a great experience! At this point the miniatures collection is very small, but the terrain pile is adequate and growing. [In the picture, the pieces with the black edges are the "unexplored beyond here" markers.]
