First Donjon game report

[Russell]

My regular group ran our first Donjon game tonight,  and it was a blast.  Here's my initial report:

The Setting:

Unknown milennia in the future,  mankind is ruled by the Nobility-  cruel feudal overlords who feast on the blood of their human subjects.  From the east creeps the Green,  a mammoth forest devouring all human life in its path.

Roughly,  this was Vampire Hunter D meets Nausicaa.

The Characters:

Locke Testosticles-  Stealthy, laid back thief.

Abilities:

Mad Boomerang Skillz
Hide in Shadows
Find Secret Doors
People Can't Resist Telling me Things
Uncanny Dodge vs. Melee

Klaproth Hessin-  Half-demon brute with nerves of steel and a heart of

gold.

Abilities:

Ass-whomping with kamas
Intimidate
Innuendo
Sleight-of-hand
Magic (Gust, Swirl)

Laylah Cross-  Mysterious dhampir.

Abilities:

Cuisinart with short blades
Hypnosis
Animal transformation (raven)
Decipher vampire languages
Aristocratic Authority

The Adventure

The PCs were brought to a smoky,  wet, backwater village by a trader named Fritz.  Fritz hired them to travel north,  through a treacherous bog,  to investigate a steel hatch he found in a hill.  Fritz believed that the hatch led to one of the underground bunkers where humans weathered the nuclear holocaust thousands of years ago.  An intact bunker would be worth lots of money as scrap metal.  The PCs were sent to investigate the bunker and bring back some initial salvage.

This phase of the session took about five minutes.  This is Donjon,  after all,  where plot hooks are meant to be straightforward.  None of the players took advantage of their NPC-manipulating abilities here;  they were pretty much still in the DM-centric mindset of our d20 game.

The PCs entered the bog,  and encountered a group of goblins,  who they quickly dispatched.

This was a fairly straightforward combat,  though they started to use their facts in interesting ways.  For example,  Locke cut the arms off of a goblin and then slapped him in the face with one.

As they camped in the bog,  Laylah spotted a fire in the distance.  The next morning,  the party found the charred remains of a small house.  In the basement,  they found the entrance to a tunnel.

This part of the scenario was where the players really started having fun with Donjon's fact currency.  The fire,  the house,  the basement,  and the tunnel were all player-created.

Chased into the tunnel by a horde of goblins,  the party found a series of hidden doors and fragmentary inscriptions.

This was mostly player-driven.  Laylah's player,  Angela,  took to using each of her facts as a word of the damaged inscriptions.  Sometimes,  I would hand her a couple more words or an entire phrase.  

Meanwhile,  Locke and Claproth's players busied themselves finding doors and ways to open them.

The party found a large crypt containing statues,  empty coffins,  and a lot of rats.  The rats circled around the room,  squeaking simultaneously at varied pitches so as to speak in a single,  human-like voice.  They seemed to be telling the party to go further into the crypt.

The outer crypt scene was the beginning of the players and I really beginning to jam together,  fact-wise.  The rats and many of the details were invented by the players,  and I spun them off in the rats-speaking-as-one direction.

Entering the inner crypt,  the party found what seemed to be a large chapel,  with an ancient congregation mumbling prayers.  On closer inspection,  the party found that the congregation had been locked into their pews and kneeling positions,  and were terribly old-  so much so that layers of dirt covered them like layers of additional skin.  Bats flying back and forth over them only made the party more cautious.  On the altar,  they found a woman bound with her mouth open,  blood dripping slowly into it in a fashion vaguely reminiscent of water torture.

Again,  the players were really getting into the fact system.  Many of the really creepy elements here were invented by the players,  and then became integral parts of the DM narration.

Studying the scenes in the artificially backlit stained glass,  the party decided that the people here probably weren't vampires,  or at least weren't vampires associated with the reigning nobility.  They decided to free the woman on the altar.  She seemed grateful,  but couldn't speak their language.

Removing her from the altar,  however,  created other problems.  It set off a distant bell,  and the bats began transforming into armed monks who appeared to be vampires themselves.  Seeing the party's attempts to free the imprisoned congregation,  the monks began executing them.

Most of this was DM-driven.

The party charged into action,  and after a tense battle,  defeated the monks.

This combat was pretty tough on the PCs-  two player characters hit 0 Flesh Wounds and had to search their provisions for healing potions.  Looting the corpses afterwards,  they didn't search for anything really special-  just Wealth and more healing potions.

As the session ended,  the party found their way back into daylight,  though they were followed by mysterious laughter.  The hatch they emerged through turned out to be the one they were looking for in the first place,  and they set off back towards the village with their newly-rescued friend.

Final Notes

Donjon played pretty smoothly.  One thing we noticed,  though,  is that the characters made unskilled Discernment checks more often than anything else (mostly when listening or looking in an effort to add facts to a scene).  This makes me think that more perception-related abilities would be a good choice in character creation.  Also,  we didn't really get much of a test of the treasure system in.  The magic system didn't get tried at all,  more or less because Cloprath's player saw more direct ways to get what he wanted.

The biggest problem I had as DM was NPC stats.  The default system is a little cumbersome for inventing monsters on the fly.  Moreover,  the initiative system,  while really excellent for PCs,  got a little slow when rolling for 5+ monsters.  The suggestion in the rules to assign each of the NPCs to a single number seemed to slow them down a bit much.  For the next adventure,  I'm going to design a stripped-down monster management system.  Suggestions?

Where the system really shone was in the players creating most of the dungeon for themselves,  and especially in adding little details that were developed into important discoveries.  I'm really looking forward to the next session.

[anonymouse]

I haven't come up with a good modular monster format.

What I wind up doing is browsing through the monster supplement (B1) for a creature of about the right level, with about the right distribution of points in Attributes and Abilities.

Then I'll just decide, "Okay, that Main Ability at 4 is going to be their Attack ability. And that Supplementary one at 2 will be Damage Things With Rocks." And so on.

It works okay.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I actually do about the same thing as Anonymouse for monsters. One of my few disappointments with Donjon is I didn't think up a better modular monster system. A list of levels and average ability scores for those levels might be a good idea: I should type that up and put it on the website.

Your game sounds like it went great, and "Locke Testosticles" is an uproarious name. One perception-based ability for each character is a good idea. Luckily, your characters are of low enough level that they could gain new abilities and use them well pretty quickly.

[Russell]

Thanks for the suggestions.  This is a fantastic game,  Clinton.  Throughout the session,  we kept finding new things to love.

BTW,  Testosticles got his last name because the other players couldn't remember what his last name was.  Pat (Claproth) started calling him Testosticles,  and it sort of stuck.  Locke proceeded to save the party's bacon a couple of times,  so by the end of the session,  there was even a Testosticles theme song.

[Russell]

We did our second game.  Here's how it went down.

The Characters

Locke Testosticles (Gino)-  Boomerang-wielding thief with lightning dexterity.

Klaproth "Kleave" Hessin (Pat)-  Half-demon farmboy with a heart of gold.

Laylah Cross (Angela)-  Cuisinart dhampir with a heart of...  well,  honestly,  they're not sure.

Dean Harper (Jeff)-  Enthusiastic young engineer who can fix- or break- anything.

Gavriella (NPC)-  The mysterious non-Common speaker they rescued from an underground cathedral-prison last session.

The Adventure

Okay,  the party is heading back through the swamp to the village of Glavheim.  Enter Dean Harper,  the new PC,  being chased by a bear.  A zombie bear.  Testosticles and Klaproth manage to take down the bear.  Harper introduces himself and tells them he found a salvageable satellite dish.  Even though farmboy Klaproth,  who's sort of the leader by default,  doesn't understand what this "super-light" dish is for,  he's quick to realize the value of it being made of metal.

This was all quite fun in a very traditional (for us) D&D way.  Particularly entertaining was Harper trying to explain why he'd want to take apart something and then put it back together.

Wandering through the swamps toward the dish,  the players hear a moaning sound.  A listen check by Harper tells them it's wood scraping on wood,  and Klaproth scouts ahead and discovers it's the cart they lost to goblins in the last adventure,  being pulled by zombies.  Klaproth rushes the cart,  kills one zombie,  then kills the other one with thrown zombie parts.

Klaproth's player,  Pat,  had five un-necessary successes on his attack roll.  He put them to good use.

They also encounter a caravan run by Fritz,  the merchant who hired them in the last adventure.  He's disappointed that the salvage operation didn't work out,  but has much bigger hassles-  apparently,  a local Noble has spread soldiers throughout the entire region,  looking for rebels.  Gavriella,  who heretofore has shown no sign that she speaks English,  ducks down in the cart when she hears this.

The party reaches the dish.  While trying to get it loose,  they capture a goblin (pinning him under a convenient "No Tresspassing" sign) and dispatch a zombie work crew who shows up for some reason.

The zombie fight was pure slapstick.  Klaproth used his magic to throw the monsters around,  and Laylah hypnotised one of them into attacking the others using his best impression of kung fu.  Also,  the debate over whether the zombies' constant shouts meant that one of them was named "Brains" was pretty hilarious.

Testosticles finds a door in the ground,  and they open it up,  only to find an irate old lady inside shaking a stick at them.  Harper knocks her down into the darkness.  Laylah walks down the steps and...  gets turned into a frog. The very angry crone shouts for "Cedric."

Cedric turns out to be the lady's grandson- a tentacled giant inside his own portable cloud of fog.  Klaproth engages him with limited success.  Meanwhile,  Laylah tries transforming into a bird,  but ends up a raven with frog's feet.  She's chased around the room by Granny,  who attacks with a zombie-head on a stick (it gnashes when she presses a button).  Seems she's planning to eat Laylah.

Klaproth and Testosticles continue to fight Cedric.  Gavriella comes to Klaproth's aid,  though she's only wielding a stick.  Harper disables the frog-spell-trap,  and manages to subdue Granny.  After negotiating for a while,  they manage to buy her satellite dish (which hasn't worked in the four hundred years she's lived here) and some monkey jerky (which they don't really want) in exchange for the goblin prisoner (she names him "Wimpy") and a moldy book from the last adventure ("No good for readin',  but at least it's still edible").

After disassembling the dish and loading it into the wagon,  the party gets going,  joined once again by Gavriella,  who sure has sharpened a lot of sticks...

Final Notes

This was a lot of fun,  though more for the characters than the action content (which there was relatively little of during the session).  I had a lot of fun listening to the character byplay.

I had lots of fun with the NPCs,  too.  Granny was entertaining in a very cartoony witch sort of way,  and I'm happy with Gavriella's balance of cute and creepy.  The overall feel was sort of a cross between an old Sierra adventure game and comic anime.  In that sense it was pretty different than last time,  which felt a lot more like the Vampire Hunter D movies which I've been stealing from shamelessly.

As far as the Donjon system,  I had to prompt the players to make stuff up a little more than last time.  Their contributions were fun,  anyway,  though.  The game also dragged in some places due to unimpressive rolls on both sides of the proverbial table.  Klaproth played with his magic some this time,  though not really in combat.  That worked smoothly.  The players are still very conservative about treasure searches,  though.  I have to convince them I really mean it when I say they can look for whatever the heck they want.  (Exception:  Harper's player has been looking desperately for Robot Pants of +1 Adroitness.  He hasn't succeeded,  yet.)