Dungeon Fantasy RPG Part 3 – Mid-Campaign Recap

Posted on July 9, 2020July 16, 2020 by Alfred Bonnabel

The Adventure Continues

We kicked off our second session by introducing a new character to the group, the gnome thief Puddin’ Noddington. The Elder Minion was now managing three characters, but was eager to jump back in to the story.

This session featured a number of new mechanics that we haven’t worked with before in addition to some exciting combat. There were opportunities to test against some of Puddin’s thief skills along with encountering the effects of disease and magic curses. Even our combats were learning experiences as we continued to become more familiar with the tactical rules elements.

New stuff learned:

Damage modifiers for type and hit locations are a bit too granular for us to incorporate at this point. Going to continue to sideline those rules for now.
DFRPG characters may not necessarily have many hit points, but they are not necessarily fragile. The knight has DR 6 which renders him almost impervious to many of the hits from the lower power vanilla enemies and traps. Even without a healer, one solid round of attacks from the three party members almost guarantees one enemy will be removed from combat.
The quick skill rolls when determining if a curse goes off is a really great system. Not only does that gamemaster have to ensure they make the base skill check, they also have to beat the target’s margin on their roll as well. Even applying a -1 curse to a character isn’t the worst thing in the world and healing magic is MUCH more readily available that in other fantasy RPG’s I’ve played.

The party ended the second session with a retreat back up to the inn to rest and patch up. Status ailments were the main cause for concern and those required specialized care. The healer who had graciously tended their wounds after the first delve agreed to join the group after hearing of the darkness below. With that, a new character has joined the party: Francesco Zombani – Human Cleric. To help the Elder Minion balance the load, I will be running this character on the party’s behalf. Francesco is a the sample cleric given in the core ruleset “Adventurers” book and embodies the classic healer class type.

And then there were four…

With a spellcaster joining the party, the group delved once again below the inn and waded immediately into combat. Session 3 of the adventure was underway!

Francesco made himself useful with his sling through several encounters and provided critical healing and support throughout the delve. However, it was not quite enough and a pair of particularly sluggish encounters meant we were unable to finish the adventure during this session as I had originally planned.

While I still enjoy the diversity of encounters and general story of “I Smell a Rat”, I’m definitely needing to make more and more adjustments to the encounters as we go along. We’ve ramped up to four characters in the party covering a wide array of functions. However, I still feel like we could use a wizard and/or another high damage warrior. One encounter in particular was a true challenge due to the monster’s DR exceeding the max damage potential of everyone in the party except the knight.

I will most likely trim off a couple of the remaining encounters to help focus our next session so that we can wrap this adventure. The Elder Minion and I are compiling a list of the mechanics that we are enjoying about DFRPG so far as well as those we are struggling with and will share that as part of the next update.