Dolmenwood Session Report 4-5: Windler House from Ragged Hollow Nightmare

 Previously, the party ran through Winter's Daughter and reunited an Elf princess with her lover. 

The party:

Gunkuss the Grim: A cowardly wood-grue fighter, who travels to sate his curiosity and find treasure. Recently bit the head off a magical dove at a wedding and was permanently turned purple, which he describes as an improvement.

Dombo the Green: An unintelligent Moss-Dwarf magic-user. Wants to become a better mage but is not interested in putting in much effort. Can talk to birds.

Episcopia the Judge: A nerdy human cleric of the church of the one true god. Kind of a nerd. Wants to FIGHT EVIL. 

Boots Tippler: A grimalkin bard who looks like Garfield. An extravagant showman, desires Fame and Fortune and something else starting with an F. 

In between sessions, Brad was spirited away by the Elven Princess Snowfall-at-Dusk to dwell with her in her tower forevermore as her consort/pet (his player had to drop out cause hey it's college).

In session 4, the party began exploring the town of Prigwort, which I played as a combination of Prigwort from Dolmenwood's zine issue 6 and the module Ragged Hollow Nightmare. After asking around town and hearing a few rumors, they decided to explore the old Windler House (detailed in Ragged Hollow Nightmare). The house had been owned by a wealthy aristocratic family, the last of whom had been a paranoid inventor who guarded the family's wealth with a multitde of traps. People also claimed the house was haunted.

• The party decided to enter the house through the window, reasoning that doors are usually trapped (it wasn't but better safe than sorry). They found themselves in a large study and made the acquaintance of a pale ghostly butler named Andrew. Andrew showed no awareness that he was a ghost or that the house was completely fallen apart and rigged with death traps, and instead acted like the party were normal visitors to Master Windler. The party had a good time roleplaying with Andrew. I played him as completely confused and oblivious to anything that was going on- he didn't notice when the party started basically tearing down the house looking for stuff, or later on when they started finding his master's reanimated corpse.  
• The party bypassed several traps, including a deadly chandelier and a bunch of shrimp-forks rigged to trip wires, mostly by throwing about a hundred books into the room until the traps ran out of ammo. They also found Andrew's long-dead skeleton, which had several shrimp-forks still embedded in his skull.
• They eventually made their way to the top floor where they found Master Windler, who was now a reanimated zombie, which they made short work of and then burned in the fireplace just in case he decided to resurrect. Andrew showed no awareness of the fact that his master was obviously a zombie, only saying he was of "slightly ill health as of late."
• The party also found a pair of clockwork shoes with tiny buttons on the heels. Boots put them on and tried clicking his heels together and was immediately launched 60 feet in the air, crashing through the ceiling and landing on the roof, where he took 13 damage and fell unconscious, prompting the party to return to town to heal up. 
• The party returned the next day. While exploring they found that the last room was filled with snakes. 
• Dombo, who can talk to birds, lured in two magpies. They used one of them as bait for the snakes, luring about half the snakes out through the window. Gunkuss, who had developed a taste for birds, ate the other one.
• The party attempted to fight the other 6 snakes, which went about as well as all of their battles:
• They paralyzed two of them with their magical freezing mirror from the tomb of Sir Oisin. 
• Dombo, who has 6 constitution and 4 hit points, got bitten by a snake, failed his save against poison, and fell unconscious. The party carried him off on their mule.
• The snakes failed their morale and ran away.

Notes

• I added in Andrew's dead corpse to the kitchen area of the module- it's a good way to telegraph all the danger in the house, plus it's fun to meet his ghost and then run into his corpse.
• I also added in the master of the house as a zombie in the bedroom, since I wanted a creepy but not-that-hard combat encounter. In the actual module his shadow shows up later in another area, but since I wasn't too sure my players would ever actually go there I figured something should happen now.
• Ragged Hollow Nightmare is a fun little intro scenario since it scatters hooks all over the place and asks the players to follow them. I was a little worried because the players picked what I initially had thought was the most boring of the hooks, but the process of searching for traps actually ended up being really fun, and Andrew the forgetful ghost butler was good comic relief.
• The big "Lesson" I'm learning is that very frequently when reading old-school modules I will think, "how the hell are the players supposed to solve that?" and have an impulse to add clues or make it easier, and every single time the players manage to come up with a solution without too much thought. 
• For example, I was nervous that the clue to get into the tomb in Winter's Daughter would be too opaque ("call to the companions," meaning say the name of the guy's dogs), but the players pretty quickly worked out what they were supposed to do and then went about investigating the tomb to find out his dog's names. 
• Similarly, I was worried about them just walking into the rooms in The Windler House and getting a face full of traps, but once they knew the place was trapped they were super cautious. By the end of it, I actually felt bad there weren't more traps, since they did lots of things that weren't necessary- they checked every single door and window, and at one point chopped through the walls of a room rather than using the door (for some reason they were certain the door was trapped). 
• They also tend to look more carefully for treasure than I anticipate. In this session they pulled all the books out of a shelf to look for hidden doors, pulled the wallpaper off the walls of a room to look for secrets, and looked under all the paintings in the house. In the future I need to start hiding more treasure in places like that.

Next Time: The players fight bandits and get wasted