The 3rd session began with the party assembled at the sealed doors to the basement of the ruins of the cathedral in Old Saurm. We hand-waved the fact that we had a slightly different set of players — this time no knight, but the fool was back, so we had Alfred of Mercia (palmer 2); Big John (fighter 1); Lord Chuckles (fool, 1); the cleric whose name escapes me; and Thomas (druid 1), who now had a wardog and basset hound in tow. I used a “one page dungeon” (OPD) as a prompt, figuring I’d use the maps and some of the general ideas but adapt it to the setting.
The sealing wax on the doors was not much of a challenge for the PCs, but the chains binding the doors were more difficult. Big John failed to break them, despite trying to crank them with a lever, but eventually they brought the horses into the cathedral and used them to pull off the chains from their anchors in the walls. Inside, they found that eerie green torches illuminated the halls and chambers. The next door they found had a brass face which challenged them with a riddle. The OPD said three wrong answers would trigger a disintegration ray, but for mostly 1st level characters that seemed a bit rough. Instead the face shot a single magic missile after three wrong answers. The bigger issue was that, having failed to find the list of riddles I usually have in a binder with some other DMing references, I went with the first riddle that came to mind, and it was more difficult than I realized (I mean, riddles are always easy if you know the answers, but evidently this a was a bit of a stumper!). So things got a little bogged down, and my risk-averse players were ready give up, as the fighter took two missiles and the cleric one (maybe a fourth for the druid? I lost count!). For the curious it was: “I met a man carrying a load of wood. It was neither crooked nor straight. How can this be?”*
They explored some empty halls and a partly flooded chapel which seemed to be a dead end. Back-tracking, they found some rooms lined with shelves, the shelves holding the skulls of monks who had served the cathedral in the past. Disturbing a door summoned a wraith-like figure of a knight Templar, who radiated cold and fought with a magic sword. They managed to defeat it (basically ogre stats) and continued on, finding a small gallery of art with a huge spider hiding in it. They defeated the spider and called it a night, hauling away the art as treasure.
This doesn’t sound like much of an adventure, but we did have to call it a bit early — it was maybe an hour and a half after the initial chatter with beer and pizza. I’ll have some more interesting encounters ready for next time.
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*The classic answer is: it is a load of sawdust; I would have accepted charcoal or ashes as plausible solutions too. The party kept focusing on other shapes that combined straight and rounded sections, with the druid player, my nephew, blurting out answers. In the chaos they repeated a few wrong answers as well. I’m getting less and less enthusiastic about riddles and puzzles. Maybe I just need to have them planned a bit better so there are some clues or foreshadowing — say, if they met a charcoal-burner on their way to the cathedral, or saw a man carting sawdust away from a sawmill.**
**Sawmills probably originated in Turkey in the 3rd century, and spread throughout the Roman Mediterranean and Arabic world. They arrived a bit later in Europe, but would be known to the medievals.