Tomb of the Serpent King 5e, session 1

I have committed an unforgivable heresy. I run a D&D 5e game.

A group of friends has recently tried kicking off a new game, but their GM fell through at the last possible moment, so I offered to take over. With their characters already made and everyone comfortable with 5e, they weren't really keen on switching to a different system, but they didn't (yet) object to my intention of slowly adding house-rules to OSRify the rule set.

And so with no time to prepare, I skimmed the converted version of my favourite starting dungeon, the Tomb of the Serpent Kings, and off we go.

Dramatis personae:

• Gour-Gash, a goliath barbarian. Strong of muscle, weak of head. Big, big maul in his hands. Probably compensating for something.
• Toxin, an owlin alchemist. Once a familiar who became an apprentice, then an adventurer when his master has met an untimely end.
• Trollin, a hill dwarf cleric. A red-robed inquisitor who curiously surrounds himself with outlanders and strange types. Definitely has a hidden agenda.
• Zeru, an air genasi warlock. A gentleman and a scholar, sent by his genie patron to learn about the barbaric customs and traditions of the far West.

If any of the players have by sheer chance found this recap, do not read any further, please.

 

At the southern edge of the Amir Steppes, where the Trollish Peaks start to rise, there lies Balalán, the city of thousand races. Should one venture from there up to the mountains, to the deep valleys and deeper forests, they will eventually arrive to the Halfway Hamlet, a village known to few and only because of its inn. Yet here's where the party was sent by their benefactor, one viscount Lucián Malévol, on a rescue mission.

But let's start from the beginning. One and a half months ago, the viscount had received a message from the Halfway Hamlet, it being a part of his estate, speaking of heavy storms that damaged the crop and caused a landslide that not only blocked the road, but also revealed an old, broken tunnel disappearing into the mountain. And that might have been it, with the road fixed and the mysterious tunnel left alone, but viscount Malévol is a great lover of mysticism and the occult arts. And right at that time, he had a well-renowned alchemist and archeologist Kryštof Harant staying at his manor.

To cut the long story short, magister Harant went to investigate this wonderfully mysterious tunnel and promptly disappeared the first day after arrival. The party was then contacted and sent to retrieve the magister and any invaluable artifacts he might have found in the depths.

***

The party arrives to the Halfway Hamlet by a stagecoach. The village is as backwater as can be - a single inn, named By the Oak, standing, wait for it, by a huge oak, then a handful of cottages, some fields and a lot of pastures with sheep. The party goes in the inn to find the local elder and innkeeper, mister Jan, to hand him the letter of authority given to them by the viscount and to question him. They learn nothing much except that magister Harant had been lodging in the inn along with his famulus, and then just never came back from the tunnel. No one in the village was foolhardy enough to search for them inside.

The party has some passable mutton goulash and then make the innkeeper's son Janek lead them to the tunnel.

Once they climb over the broken trees and ground torn apart by the landslide, they consider using Janek as a torch-bearer, but eventually decide to just leave him at the entrance to watch for any outside threats. They also promise him a whole gold coin for his help, so he's quite giddy to help.

They creep inside, coming to the first junction and investigating both guard tombs, but they don't dare to disturb the sarcophagi inside. They continue to the second junction, finding that that scholar's tomb was already opened - the tracks suggest two people, likely magister Harant and the famulus, had recently moved the lid. Inside, they find a terracotta statue of a snake-headed scholar, and one of the statue's fingers is broken off, revealing the hollow inside. Gour-Gash promptly smashes the statue. (The party was lucky that the gas was already gone from this statue.)

Toxin collects a golden pendant in the shape of a rune-inscribed cobra from among the terracotta shards and ancient bones, then they move on to the last side tomb. There they push the lid off of the sarcophagus and spy the silver ring on the hand of the terracotta sorcerer. They discuss at length whether or not to smash all the statues for the loot, but (rightly) fear that a hollow statue might contain a nasty surprise, like a gas. Eventually, they agree to came back later.

As Zeru puts it: "The statues were here for hundreds of years. They will not run off now." (Now that I think about it, they might. They might.)

And so they go deeper, to the barred stone gate. More serpentine designs can be found on the gate and Trollin recognizes them as belonging to the Serpent King, a god-sorcerer of yore. They find further tracks of the magister and his famulus, but no other signs of them nor any clue where they might have disappeared to. The party wonders for a bit about the fact that the gate is barred from the outside, clearly containing something inside of the tomb, and that magister Harant couldn't have easily gone through the gate and close it behind him. They even bring up searching for an alternate entrance (Good idea!), but then they just say "Screw it, maybe they got inside with magic." and go to unbar the gate.

They notice the pegs starting to rise, they can hear a faint clicking noise from above, but they shrug and believe in their saving throws and hp pools. The swing of the huge hammer trap nearly catches Toxin and Trollin, but they roll out of the way. Gour-Gash, on the other hand, is caught square across the back and rammed through the gate, opening it in the process. Good thing that his player thought to use Stone's Endurance ability; Gour-Gash still picks himself up with only 2 hp left. Cue nervous laughter around the table.

The false king's tomb is expansive, its walls covered by murals of snake people experimenting on other races and warring among themselves. More importantly, there are three thrones of dark stone, with a terracotta statue seated on each - two snake-princesses on the sides and a (fake) serpent king on the middle throne, with a crown and a sceptre of real gold set into the statue. The party scours the room, with Toxin even flying up to the ceiling and searching for secret doors or compartments there, but they refuse to touch the statues. Tempted as they might be, they reason that they are on a rescue mission, not a tomb-robbing one, so they should prioritise exploration over looting.

They continue to the false temple and find the collapsed secret door under the pedestal of the Serpent King's statue. Trollin at the front, they go deeper, down the circular stairwell.

They creep through the statue hall, expecting a monster behind every statue, but instead they find two other things - a statue twisted out of alignment and a collapsed figure on the floor, still breathing but bloodied and unconscious. They approach the figure carefully, expecting a jump scare, but it's really just lying and dying there. They turn it face up and realise it's a goblin, albeit one in an uncharacteristically nice (blood- and mud-streaked) clothing. They discuss whether they shouldn't just coup-de-grace it, but then Toxin reaches into his pocket and pours a healing potion down the goblin's throat.

Which is when Gour-Gash learns that Toxin had a healing potion and Trollin has healing magic, yet nobody has bothered to heal him and he is still shuffling around battered by the hammer trap. They still don't heal him, despite his grumbling.

The goblin sputters and coughs, then sits up. Trollin grabs him, pulls him to standing, then violently shakes him and screams questions right into his face. When the situation is de-escalated by the rest of the party, they learn that the goblin's name is Schmee and that he is a famulus to magister Harant.

They were indeed investigating this tomb when they were ambushed and knocked unconscious by a group of other goblins. Schmee insists that these goblins were hideous, unhygienic and overall barbaric. They took Schmee and the magister to some cave, likely deeper in the tomb, where they made Schmee work their mushroom fields while chaining magister Harant to a throne and insisting that he is now their king, irrespective of his objections. Also the goblins have no soap, their living conditions are atrocious and their cooking unpalatable, according to Schmee.

Eventually, Schmee had seen a chance to escape when his goblin guard dozed off and he seized it. Unfortunately, the guard woke up and a scuffle ensued, where Schmee managed to get away but not without injuries. Bleeding and with no light, he got lost in the tunnels and eventually passed out right where the party found him. When he hears that the party is on a rescue mission to free his master, he is overjoyed.

As the conversation with Schmee drifts from his misadventures in this tomb to bonsai trees and various types of tea - Zeru has apparently found a soulmate in the goblin - Trollin fiddles with the tilted statue and quickly learns that pulling on the snake-guard's spear opens a secret door in the alcove. He goes to the hidden guardroom, rummages through the debris and retrieves a gold serpent pendant, but leaves usable two spears behind. When he returns to the rest of the party, they are still engaged in a lively debate with the rather chatty goblin. However, as Schmee has no more actually useful information to offer, he is sent to retrace the party's steps back through the upper tomb and away to the village. He disappears into the dark, alone.

Finally, the party moves on to the tomb atrium. They eye the pool in the middle of the room mistrustfully and want nothing to do with it. Instead, they search the rest of the room. Two doors out of the seven in the room are slightly ajar - the door directly across from the entrance and the first one to the right from the entrance. Without Schmee, they have no easy way to determine which were the ones he used, but there are a few blood splatters which point to the right door. It screeches painfully as Gour-Gash pushes it open and a sudden pounding can be heard from the northernmost door on the opposite side of the atrium.

Unsure what to do, the party approaches the door as the pounding continues. They are loath to leave a possible threat behind their backs, so Gour-Gash carefully pushes the door open with the end of his maul. That saves him from a surprise strike of a great-axe as a skeleton steps through.

The first initiative of the game is rolled and the skeleton wins it easily, immediately taking down Gour-Gash with a single blow. His player grumbles, but the rest of the party descends upon the skeleton. Toxin and Zeru pelt the skeleton with sling shots and magic, Trollin steps up to tank the skeleton's assault and get Gour-Gash back on his feet with some healing, then Gour-Gash gets a quick revenge by demolishing the skeleton with a lucky strike.

Now chuckling about how the first monster nearly meant the first death (It really didn't, 5e offers way too much leeway when dying. That will have to be house-ruled.), the party returns to the door they wanted to explore and we close the curtain until the next session.

GM Commentary
The "less rolling, more descriptions of actions" way of playing has been well-received, it seems.

It was nice that some combat happened at the very end of the session, as all the players were eager for some hack and slash action. I fully expected them to find and fight the skeletons in the false king's tomb, but the quest of rescuing a kidnapped magister has turned out to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the players were really keen on having a clear goal within the tomb. On the other hand, they prioritised pushing deep into the tomb as quickly as possible, so they favoured the way forward over poking at fun things. I've added the cracked scholar statue and then the extra treasure in the false king's tomb in hopes of them taking the bait and smashing open one of the fun statues, but no luck.

Magister Harant and Schmee were actually kidnapped outside of the tomb and taken in through the alternate entrance directly to the goblin caves, but the party has dropped the idea of tracking the magister and Schmee too quickly to notice that. Speaking of Schmee, he was inspired by the converted TotSK and he worked great for giving the players vague warnings of the dangers to come.

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