Group 1 | Session 3: "Seventeen Percent"
Four strangers entered a story before they entered a dungeon. They spoke the dead into history. They gave names to the grief that built these halls. They learned, in the manner of folklore, what happened here, which means they learned several things that contradict each other, and all of them are true.
These are lightly polished recaps from an ongoing Beneath Ahknoor playtest campaign: emergent dungeon fantasy built collaboratively at the table through exploration, folklore, scavenging, grief, and bad decisions made underground.
The events below were not scripted in advance. My role as Keeper was to ask questions, follow consequences, and let the dungeon become what play demanded.
The recaps are generated by AI from my session notes and edited for accuracy and voice. The facts, factions, and consequences are mine; the prose is collaborative. See all the recaps here.
The Tuesday group includes:
- Chris as Gueller
- Danny as Caspian
- Matt as Swalthazar
- Torrens as Tengi
The catacombs are waiting.
Previously: A figure stepped out of the dark and into the torchlight of the chapel: a corpse, upright, with insects flying in and out of it like a structure they had built. A glass eye sat in the socket of the altar statue, watching something specific. Nobody had yet looked at what it was aimed at. One clue. One doorway. One thing standing in it that was no longer concerned with the business of the living.
The Walking Hive
The camera opens where it left off.
The Walking Hive fills the chapel doorway. Insects circle. Ink is pressed against Caspian's legs.
Nobody suggests leaving.
Cut to Tengi, who goes first. The attack is not going to be enough, and he knows it, and he reaches for the one argument he has always won: he has survived worse.
Close on his face. The camera finds the memory behind it: the frozen sea, the ice-bound dead, the man-sickle.
He slides in feet-first, into the creature's knees. As it folds, he buries his hatchet in the back of its skull.
Clean kill.
The insects do not take it well.
Swalthazar goes through what is left of the body and finds nothing useful. What he gets instead is bitten. He comes away Fly Bitten, and the camera holds on the bites a moment longer than he would like.
Close on Caspian, weighing his Wharfrat's Luck. It is good once per level. He keeps it in his pocket.
Seventeen Percent
The party turns to the glass eye.
Caspian does what Caspian does. He rolls his dice and reads them, and they say the eye is pointing toward the Processional Hall. He rolls a second die to learn how far to trust that.
Seventeen percent.
The camera holds on the die.
Pat allows that this probably means a different room.
They go anyway, Caspian feeling his way forward by sensitivity, and within a few turns of the connecting halls nobody can say where they are. Every passage looks like the last one.
Slow pan down.
Three suits of old armor lie scattered across the floor ahead, in the loose way of things that fell a long time ago.
Then they pull together.
The pieces find each other. The suits rise. Three Children of Senkrit stand up in the hallway with no faces inside them.
The Right-Hand Rule
Cut to Gueller, who is already moving.
He calls the right-hand rule and coaches them to keep it quick. The party runs. Gueller counts corners. He is sure of this.
The camera pulls up to show the whole route, and it is a loop.
They have come around so neatly that they arrive behind the Children instead of in front of them, which is either the worst navigation of the campaign or the best. Gueller comes out of it Turned Around.
He does not mention this.
Three Children
Swalthazar throws first, half-blind with bites, and the spear goes straight through the place where one Child's skull would be. It clatters down the far side of the armor.
Close on his eyes.
They go dark. All of it, at once. In the dark, the spear is whispering, and the whisper is what guided his hand. Now they all know what this spear does. When he attacks with it, he cannot see. Something else does the looking for him.
Blinded, for the moment. Matt reaches for a scar instead.
He was near the top of a tower once, when a dragon burned it down. He got out with burn scars and little else.
The sight comes back. The Child comes apart.
Cut to Caspian, belaying pin in hand. He swings upward through the second Child's chest cavity, a fine and confident blow, and it knocks the helmet loose.
The helmet lands on his head. Backward.
Hold on this.
He cannot see. His pride, which is on the line most of the time, is about to be Humiliated, and Danny takes a scar to stop it. When he was a boy, a floor collapsed. His friend fell. Caspian had stopped to grab a shining necklace from the rubble.
He wears it still.
Close on the necklace. The camera stays there longer than he would like too.
That leaves one.
Gueller comes up behind it with his sneaky knife. He does not strike the armor. He slips the blade along the leather straps that hold it together, one after another, and the Child of Senkrit collapses in sections, clanking down onto the stone.
Behind where it stood, the camera finds a niche nobody could have seen before.
Slow push in.
The Face in the Salt
A funeral mask, carved from a single large piece of pink salt.
It is shaped to resemble one of them.
The camera moves across four faces and does not say which. That question is not for tonight. The dungeon will ask it again at the Unlocking Move, and someone will have to answer.
Fade to black.
Where Things Stand
Two clues: the glass eye and the mask. The complexity of this level is four, and the odds are not yet with them.
Three factions now have names. The Children of Senkrit, met twice now. The Tomb Robbers, whose desecration covers every wall of this level, and who have not yet shown themselves alive. The Corpse Ants, unseen so far, large insects that store corpses in their abdomens and ferment them into something called honey.
Swalthazar is Fly Bitten. Gueller is Turned Around. Two more scars have been paid for, and the spear has told its secret, or at least the first part of it.
They are still lost.
The catacombs are not done with any of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment