Guest Report: Greyhawk Session 1

As I discussed in the last session report for Nightwick Abbey, I was going to have one of my players (my wife) do the recap to break up the monotony of my droning.  I also hoped to both get and give an account of what the players' experience at my table.  What follows is her recap, which includes some lovely pictures she drew.  Since she was rather vague about it, I'll state that she played the cleric and move on to the report.

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Evan asked me to do a write up of Tuesday’s session, which I accepted but was reluctant to do. Mostly because I find it difficult to express myself verbally, but also because I’m not part of the Old School Gaming community,  and really, I’m not too familiar with D&D aside from just being a casual player. But I guess that’s the point of this, to take a peek at the game from a player’s point of view. Since so many of us players were not familiar with the AD&D rules we spent the previous session making our characters and discussing the mechanics. That made this our first session in the City of Greyhawk and its nearby castle.

We found ourselves at the Green Griffin Inn, where one of our Fighters, Brevian, our Magic User, Nilrem, and our Gnome, Xel were engaged in a game of darts as our other Fighter, Leerk, and our Cleric, Aczey, watched on. We were all pretty sure that Nilrem would win, because he was trained with darts, but when the game was done Brevian was the victor and received the grand prize of three whole gold! Eventually we decided the party was drunk enough to brave the Castle Greyhawk and we set off to recover our Thief, the creepy park lurker, Slimey.

From what I understood there is a large park in the city proper, filled with trees and uppity people strolling about. Apparently some rumors were floating around that some Dryads were giving away their, um, goodies to men who could catch them. Silmey just so happened to hear that rumor, so that’s where he was, and had been for nearly a week straight. I’m pretty sure he smelled lovely to all those Lords and Ladies strolling around. He was actually reluctant to leave with us, but we eventually were able to convince him he would be getting all the treasures he needed, to impress any kind of woman he could dream of, in the Castle.

The Castle itself was pretty interesting!  We found a trap door that lead to a section that seemed to be all storage. The two men we hired were killed by what I think were fire beetles, but I got the impression they were large lightning bug types with pincers. 

We spent a lot of time combing through boxes, trying to see if they contained anything interesting or useful. They didn’t. One room we came across was filled with crates of rotting foods, and since it was a larger room some of us really wanted to get into it and check the place out. Some of us didn’t, because of the huge, disgusting grubs feeding on the meaty sludge. To determine whether the carrion eaters proved a threat we threw the body of one of our slain hired men into the room. He was quickly covered in the things and we decided to just burn it all! Once the fire died down and the room was relatively safe we were rewarded with a secret door that took us to something, well, new.

The room we wound up in was like any other room in the Castle, only it contained a silly faceless statue with a coin slot on its chest. Brevian stuck a copper piece into the slot, which activated the thing. Its hands started whirling about while it played circus music and its face started to appear.  It pointed a finger at our poor fighter and he was instantly zapped to dust. Glowing magical runes scrolled over the pedestal and its face settled on one screwed up in anger. We couldn’t read the runes, but terrified and fascinated by the thing our Cleric, Aczey, tried to shove a few gold pieces in, which just seemed to get stuck.

We checked another room, it had a few more of those fire beetles, which we lobbed some flaming oils at until we could get away. By then, with three of those we came in with dead, we decided it was time to leave, and also call it an evening well spent.

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So there you have it.  I hope you found it enlightening.