Basements and Braunsteins

Session 10: Benson Use Your Magic!

Roster

Downtime

Session Report

What a session. A lot of this session consisted of the party bantering back and forth and clowning on each-other.

For the first time the party reached out and hired some henchmen to help them on their adventures, hopefully this becomes more common because it is the bread and butter of AD&D. They “hired”, or paid a stipend to the Church so they could use Brother Bacon’s abilities, and they also went to MMGGA country and hired a magic-user proud boy named Benson.

The parties aim was to follow some recent rumors about a “rat king” somewhere in the sewers. The party is familiar with giant rats and they think they are the perfect outfit for the job.

(It is at this time they go to hire the henchmen.) Luckily, a player showed up late to the party and was able to take over the NPC of Benson. I quickly wrote some secret notes about Benson, and handed the paper to our new player. The main secret was: Benson is actually a thief, not a magic-user. This was actually hilarious because every encounter thereafter the party was trying to get Benson to cast some magic and Benson kept saying he needed to save his magic and fireballs until they find the rat-king, a believable excuse.

Before they starts their expedition into the sewers they stop at the tavern to grab some drinks and food. While there some start to eye Benson because he is wearing the purple-turban, a sign of allegiance to the Archives and the Make the Mages Guild Great Again movement. Benson, who was a paid protestor, took off his turban and threw it on the ground. When they left they found a dead merchant they had previously encountered that was trying to sell them silver daggers, and other ornamental weaponry. Gideon took it upon himself to loot the late fellow of his silver daggers. They then made for the sewers.

When they got to the sewers they picked a marching order and began making their way along a ledge as to not wade through the sewer water. It started slowly without any encounters and mostly ’empty’ rooms filled with gnawed corpses, melted down candles, boxes of simple supplies, and some rat remains.

Soon though, Bluebow picked up on the smell of some type of rats and they began to follow it. They passed through a few chambers without any encounters picking up 250gold and splitting it among themselves. In some rooms they found some copper and silver as-well but for the most part they left it there because they didn’t want to be weighed down too much if the “rat-king” came out.

Eventually, they came to a room where they encountered their “rat-king”, or what they believed to be the rat king. It was a towering figure, as tall as any of the PC’s. They guessed correctly that it was a wererat but they didn’t actually know that only silver daggers could harm it. Fortunately, Gideon took those daggers.

The encounter starts with Gideon landing his first blow and missing his next few. While the other party members landed their attacks, they couldn’t do any damage because their weaponry wasn’t silver. At one point Benson takes a silver dagger from Gideon because his sword isn’t doing anything. (Mind you the person playing Benson has virtually zero experience playing AD&D and usually just shows up to sessions to hangout with the boys.) So this was an encounter changing action.

There were able to slay the wererat without, to their knowledge, anyone contracting lycanthropy. Upon the body of the wererat, slipped between it’s waist and a rope belt was a rolled up treasure map.

They found an exit of the sewers that lead the back to the saves under Stu’s basement. A coincidence?

They were able to make it back to safety in the basement without triggering any random encounters.

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Aftermath

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#1e #brosr #session report