Tonight we played a one-shot! Check it on out!
The game is Wicked Ones. I made a character back here, but basically the players are the monsters in a fantasy dungeon. Actually, the main "protagonist" in the game is the dungeon, more than the characters. Having now run a one-shot, I would really like to run a campaign. But that's a discussion for another time, I suppose.
We begin on an island in a chain of islands, Our heroes...well, our monsters, anyway...have recently escaped from a dungeon that was destroyed by adventurers. They are:
- Nak, the Goblin Marauder. Nak is obsessed with planning, with puzzling out every little bit of a battle plan. She may, in fact, have contributed to the dungeon's fall by overplanning and getting folks frustrated.
- Ekke, the Kobold Brute. Ekke is a scrapper. They're big for a kobold, and very muscular. They're also pretty distractable, especially where small edible animals are concerned. In fact, they might have been chasing a tasty squirrel when they should have been on guard duty...
- Görk, the Mimic Crafter. Görk is a mimic that kinda got stuck. He's got long spindly legs and a treasure chest with teeth for a face. He's also more than a little paranoid, and got spooked at every little noise in the old dungeon, and so wound up crying wolf a bit too much.
- Gremory, the Demon Shaman. Gremory wasn't from the old dungeon. She was kicked out of Hell (it's political, and she doesn't want to talk about it) and came up through the volcano. She met up with the others and they hit it off. Gremory is a bit of a talker and fixated on perfecting spells.
The four of them are on an island, hunched under some palm trees in a driving tropical storm. They haven't eaten in a couple of days and haven't had proper shelter since they got to this island. They sit around and talk about their ideal home - a dungeon stronghold secure enough to send forces out to loot and pillage at will. Perhaps it could have basalt pillars at the gates, and some kind of magical trap to restrict access. This volcanic island makes them think that obsidian halls and pools of lava would be nice, too.
As they're talking, they hear humans chattering. They don't understand the Light Tongue, but they know it - and the people they're hearing are clinking glasses and obviously comfortable. They sneak off through the trees and spot them - a group of fishermen in a seaside cave, protected from the elements, drinking grog and roasting a pig on a spit. This cannot stand.
They decide to ambush them, luring them up the slope a bit to a plateau and rolling a boulder at them. They manage to lure them just fine, but when Ekke pushes the boulder, the others realize that the "boulder" was just...a rock, not big enough to squish anyone. The fishermen can now see the characters, and Gremory conjures up a bat to fly down and get in their faces.
That distraction works nicely for Görk to make his move. See, in a flashback we see that it wasn't a rock that Ekke threw down the slope, but Görk's newest invention, the reusable bomb. The device detonates and throws some of the fisherman forward, rattling the others, and that's when Ekke charges in, swinging their club and knocking dudes off the mountain into the surf.
At this point only one human is left, so Nak leaps out and roars in his face...or tries. It's been wet and humid and Nak's voice is shot, and he starts coughing. The human takes this opportunity to slash at him with a knife, and Nak drops back to avoid getting stabbed. Ekke runs over to help, and whacks the fisherman in the knees. He falls to one knee, but that puts him on good stabbing height to Ekke.
Görk sneaks up behind the fisherman with his repeating crossbow and takes a shot, but the guy hears him and flings his knife. It sticks in Görk's chest, but the crossbow fires and peppers the dude with bolts. He falls dead, and the monsters roar in victory!
They invade the humans' cave and find that it goes deep enough to make for the beginnings of a nice dungeon. They eat the pig and drink the grog, and pass out warm and dry. They awaken to a scraping sound - tiny volcanic imps, monkey-like creatures with mask-like faces and lava veins on their skin - are starting to move in. They scrape the soot from the walls to reveal obsidian underneath, and the monsters know this is home.
Over the next few months, the monsters expand the dungeon. They construct the magical trap at the front door that Görk had thought up, which then leads to a skull-filled hallway that the minions use for recreation. Right off that hall, though, is a guard post. Past the hallway is a big room full of lava with stepping stones to get across it...but some of those stones are illusions! Sploosh! Sizzle!
Ahem. Three rooms branch off the lava. One is a lair, a big room in which dwells a gelatinous cube. One is the dungeon's War Room; the monsters build a big conference table, but they still need enough intel on the surrounding civilizations to make strategy possible. And the last is a corridor lined with magical goop fungus that slows down anyone that gets coated in it, with an illusory gem at the end.
The staircase leading down to the monsters' sanctum is just past the gelatinous cube's lair, and their sanctum contains their hoard. Some of it is naturally occurring gemstones that they've found over the course of building this place, and some of it is cool shit that Gremory brought from Hell. Either way, they're not going to let any damn adventurer take it!
As part of setting up the dungeon, Nak and Ekke contact some buddies (goblins and kobolds, respectively). Nak puts together a small squad of goblin head-busters, while Ekke brings in a trio of kobold witches. Gremory, meanwhile, has a bonded spirit - a demonic camel creature simply called "Camel." This way, the dungeon has a little extra muscle.
Before they can really do some damage, though, they need to finish their war room. Gremory contacts a friend, another demon named Agares, who lives in the nearby village and sells his demonic services to the human populace. Gremory drops in to ask who an important human is, someone who might know the islands. Agares isn't really interested in chaos around here (chaos is bad for business), but agrees to help if Gremory forfeits some upcoming loot. It turns out that there's a rich human, someone who owns a large mansion (built from local materials but not in the local style, so it's not terribly stable) who's very well-regarded in human society. Gremory brings this intel back to the group, and they prepare their raid.
The plan is simple enough - get in, grab the dude, get out. They decide to saw a hole in the floor of the house. It's built on stilts in the bay, so they just have to swim in. They go in under cover of night, leaving Camel outside as a scout - anything goes weird, he'll manifest and bellow. Nak cuts a hole in the floor and pops up into a pantry, and the guy they want is just right there, in his dressing gown, getting a midnight snack. (This, kids, is what happens when you get a critical for the engagement roll.)
Nak jumps up into the pantry, grabs the guy, and snarls at him in Dark Tongue. She pulls him back down through the hole into the sea and they all (the four Wicked Ones, plus all eight of the minions) start swimming away. But when they swim past the back pork/pier, they hear a shout in Light Tongue. A flamboyantly dressed human with a cutlass in one hand and a small crossbow in the other stands on the dock, directly guards with crossbows. The characters don't understand him, but it's clear what he is telling them.
Thinking quickly, Gremory conjures up kept to grab the stilts and shake the house, throwing off the archers' aim. It works, but the kelp grabs them, too, keeping them from swimming away. Ekke shouts that shooting at them will risk hitting their master (in Dark Tongue, but the archers get the gist), but that just means they focus on Ekke! He has his kobolds try to set the pier on fire, but they fuck up the spell and disintegrate the kelp.
Nak turns the rich man over to Ekke and swims toward the pier, leaping up out of the water like a porpoise...at which point the archers draw a bead on her. Gremory is quick on the draw, though, and conjures up a swarm of crabs. The little beasties clatter their way up onto the pier and start pinching at the guards, so Nak is unharmed. Meanwhile, Ekke starts swimming away with the prisoner in tow.
Görk plays to his strength as a mimic and floats gently towards the back of the pier, and then hauls himself out and rolls his reusable bomb towards the guards...but doesn't realize that the dock is sloped towards him. The bomb rolls back at him and blows him back into the water, as Nak faces off with the swashbuckler. The fancy man fires his crossbow and Nak brings up a handy nearby crate to block it, but the swordsman strikes and slashes Nak across her arm. She panics, obsessing over the plan and where it's gone wrong, and runs back into the pantry to try and puzzle it through.
The swashbuckler doesn't follow, choosing to spend the time brushing crabs off his men. Görk pulls himself into the pantry and talks Nak down ("It's fine, this is just plan C!"), and they jump back into the water and swim off. The swashbuckler stands on the dock shaking his fist at them and yelling in Light Tongue.
Back at the dungeon, Ekke and their kobolds question the rich man and learn quite a bit about the surrounding islands. The brass ring is definitely the big city to the north, but they're by no means ready to hit that yet. Ekke also takes a seal of office off the guy; that's definitely going to be useful at some point! Unfortunately, the magical questioning kind of breaks the guy, and he's not much good for anything except singing about coconuts.
As the characters are blowing off steam, though, the swashbuckler arrives at their door. He's tracked them! He's accompanied by a man in a robe carrying a book and a quill, clearly taking notes on all this. They take some time getting through the front door, but they do eventually puzzle out the password. Of course, that dumps them right into the skull hallway, and the goblin guards and there playing soccer with a skull. The swashbuckler draws his weapons and the goblins attack, beating him with clubs, but the swashbuckler dips and weaves and slashes at them. They press the attack, but he runs one of them through and the rest scatter. The kobold witches, in the guard post, try to hurl fire at the invaders, but they manage to botch the spell and it backfires, killing one of them. The swashbuckler doesn't even notice that there are more there, he just presses on.
The illusion stones in the lava room are no obstacle; the man in the robe knows how to detect them. What they're not expecting is Camel, who hovers through the room spooking the cartographer. He starts chanting a counter-curse to dispel Camel, and Camel just manifests and knocks the dude into the lava with this neck. The swashbuckler calls a lamentation, but presses on.
He ventures down the hall into the goop, but the goop is dried out (they need to make sure to water it) and so doesn't have any real effect. Likewise, the lock on the door to the war room only take a moment for him to figure out, and he realizes that the monsters are planning to sack the city! ("I mean, yeah, eventually.")
He enters the lair of the gelatinous cube, and makes short work of it - the lair is too big for such a slow monster. Leaving behind little jello-chunks, he descends the stairs into the sanctum.
The monsters are getting ready for him, but aren't quite in place when he kicks in the door. He fires a shot at Görk, but the mimic ducks and weaves and dodges. Nak and Ekke go charging in to the attack, and the swashbuckler drops his crossbow and engages them. He discovers, however, that fighting opponents with big, heavy weapons (Ekke's club and Nak's ax) calls for a different approach than dueling.
Nak bites his sword arm, but hits a bracer. He drops his sword into his other hand and slashes at Ekke, handily holding his own. But then Gremory summons a flock of bats to fly into his face and blind him, and Ekke gets a running start, leaps up in the air, and brings their club down on the adventurer's head. Crunch.
The monsters howl in victory and loot the body. Gremory makes sure to take his hat, which has a distinctly magical vibe in addition to being just fabulous. The monsters have fended off an invader of some skill, but they now have an empty lair. There is much work to do before the next raid!
(Which would happen in another session, but again, one-shot. I really like this game, though.)
