A Boy and His Beetle

Fantasmo, a 5 minute sketch done before the game started.

Last weekend (yeah, getting behind on these posts, but hey, my grad school stuff is finished now, so for the next two months or so posts may be up!), Justin ran another session of Vaults of Ur.

This time, wanted to try out the Stars Without Number combat rules more, so I made Fantasmo Argento, a masked luchador.  He ended up in the ruins, the rest of his party killed or captured by lizard men, and teamed up with Venerable Carolus (Dean), Borg the Orc (Jeremy), Yargrob Elderbob the Mage (Robert) and Ralex the Warrior (NPC) to continue exploring the tunnels for a way out (the previous session, which I'd missed, left them stranded on the shore of an underground river).

We headed west, thinking that would bring us back to the Hive, and encountered the lair of a Volkswagon Beetle-sized Giant Beetle.  After communicating to it through Hive bug powder and the party's war beetle (Karl doing most of the talking), we sent it on its way to devour the remains of the party's battle in the previous session rather than trying to eat us.  But we had no real useful info from it.

The next cave took us to a room full of bones, with a large pillar with severed heads attached.  Fantasmo stealthily approached, and discovered that the heads were still alive, and watching and listening to the rest of the party back at the entrance.  We were all fairly wary of this, and retreated down the tunnel.

We battled a slime monster of unknown type, burning it to death.  We discovered some fungus that when its spores were inhaled, made the fighting men types' testosterone surge and we all became belligerent.  Burg, under the influence, got into a tussle with Ralex, but the discovery of a large door guarded by two giant iron statues across a bridge quickly ended that.  The statues almost killed Burg, but he escaped across the bridge and we tried other paths.

We found a tomb complex, and luckily (random roll determined that Karl had the key we'd found, not Thidrek - who was back in Fort Low studying languages*) Karl was able to open it.  Inside, there was a room with four stone masks and an altar.  Fantasmo, being a luchador, was immediately drawn to the masks, and having witnessed the power of Karl's stone fist tried one on.  It burned itself against his face, and could not be easily removed.

In the next room, however, we found three strange creatures.  They looked like stone pillars moving across the floor toward us, and atop each was another stone mask.  Well, we sprang into battle, only to find out that two were illusions and the last one was actually made of acidic slime.  Fantasmo had tried to use his fancy lucha on the real one, but found out too late that it was able to burn his arms off.  Adios, Fantasmo!**

Karl's stone fist splattered the creature.  And the party retreated back to the shore, with designs on possibly killing the large beetle to use its shell as a canoe.

To be continued tonight!

Note of Interest: Justin made this dungeon up using the 1E DMG's random dungeon generator.


*Thidrek studying languages was the official story, but I think he was more likely wallowing in Sleestak existential dread, and sniffing fumes from the potion-making being done by Necronal the Cut-Rate Sage to get high.

**First time I've had a character die in I don't know how long.  DM too much, and when I've played in recent years it's often been in systems where it's hard to die.  It felt kinda good to see Fantasmo go down to an interesting death.