Lost in the Dungeon

Last night, several of us were in the mood to play - including me, since I will be busy tonight with grad school stuff and will miss our regularly scheduled Saturday game.  And since Justin was out, I offered to run my Megadungeon.

Jeremy and Rick were the only players to show up, and they rolled up a couple of new level 1 PCs, Evinarus the (Elf) Thief and Max the Fighter.  Rick didn't have the Basic Fantasy RPG and I was too lazy to look it up since I had my homebrew players' guide right there, so he ran a normal Thief class character and role-played the Elf parts (I did let him have infravision and better secret door detection and we didn't meet any ghouls so the paralysis never came up).  Jeremy of course rolled another 18 Str Fighter with a polearm (great axe), and while he's perfectly fine to imagine for himself massive anime bulging muscles that would put the Incredible Hulk to shame, my world just doesn't work that way.  ;)

They gathered some rumors in the town of Silverwood and set out for the dungeon.  They circled around the outer curtain wall and found a boarded up wooden shack against the outer wall.  Discussions with the occupants (who refused to show themselves) sent them back to town to get a pony keg of beer and they also hired Valeria, a buxom mercenary, to accompany them for 10gp up front and a share of any treasure.

Back at the shack, they found it was manned by thirsty gnomes, who happily let them pass and use the stairs down to the dungeon in return for the beer.  At the bottom of the stairs, there was a closed doorway and Evinarus heard singing beyond.  Going out into a wide corridor running north-south, they heard the singing coming from a side passage straight ahead - and after some cautious moves, discovered it to be a party of young halflings having a party in the dungeon!  Much discussions hinted that goblins lived to the east. 

They explored a bit more and found and set fire to a rickety barricade with alarms that summoned a large warband of kobolds, who shot at them and wounded Max with a crossbow.  A patrol of more gnomes had passed them and had rushed off to get the beer their companions were swilling, but the party followed them back up and convinced them to help take on their ancestral enemies, the kobolds.  Big battle led to all but two kobolds dead, the last two fled, with only one gnomish loss.  Then the party tried to sucker the gnomes into tangling with the halflings over beer, but the halfling party was just wrapping up and they were about to head back to their village, all the beer consumed. 

With promises to bring more beer once they found some treasure, the party next investigated a hallway with many doors.  One led to a makeshift latrine.  Another had a basin collecting run-off water.  Yet another had two strange walls, one a shifting wall trap of some sort which they avoided setting off, the other a secret door.  In the secret chamber was a strange crystal wall blocking them from reaching an alcove where they could see a finely crafted elven bow.  While searching for secret levers or some other mechanism to move the crystal wall, a pair of hungry giant racer snakes slithered in and attacked.

Rolls went against our party.  Although they managed to slay one snake, Max was eaten and instead of fleeing, Evinarus decided to keep fighting and his 4 hit points didn't last him long.  Valeria the NPC fled with the measly 200 cp they'd managed to loot off of the kobolds.

She does, however, now have a map of the area explored, and along with Geissler and Kessel, will join the rouster of local NPC armsmen for hire.