The Second D&D Tarak Campaign - Down The Hole

Welcome to the ongoing saga of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I ran a little while back, using The Sunken Citadel module from the Tales From The Yawning Portal source book.

In the last post, the party rogue had an unfortunate and terminal experience with a potted plant that came to life as he was trying to hide behind it. But the party as a whole managed to finally kill the goblin chief and all his bodyguards.

I hope you enjoy my D&D campaign write-ups, and the commentary I add to them. Questions, comments and feedback are welcome !

Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio

With his body still warm, the party rapidly looted both Reaswe the ex-rogue and the various goblin corpses lying around.

After that, it was time for the player to create a new character. He created a bard seemingly designed to be as annoying as possible, and gave him the dubious name Fartacus.

I think he was upset at the death of Reaswe. While I had some sympathy, I'd taken every opportunity to warn the players that second level characters are fragile and need to be played carefully until they get to a level high enough to bring resilience - by about 5th level, they should be tough enough to be very unlikely to fall to just a couple of hard hits or unlucky die rolls.

We bought him into the game via a bit of hand-waving, saying he'd just wandered through cleared areas of the dungeon until he bumped into the heroes. A bit of a cheap shot, but it kept things moving !

Our heroes, now back up to strength, took time to grab a short rest, and then decided it was time to go down the shaft at the centre of the goblin chieftain's chamber.

The circular shaft had a low two foot high wall around it to help reduce the number of people falling accidentally to the level below, and was lined with vines which could be climbed down without too much difficulty.

No longer having a rogue, it was Griff the beasthide shifter who went down first. The actual climb was eighty feet, which he made without any real issues. Light wasn't too much of a problem as the large chamber below was lit by luminescent fungus.

The chamber below turned out to be a fungus garden. It was lucky that Griff went down first, because he almost immediately encountered the two twig blights hidden among the fungi, and the two skeleton "gardeners" looking after the garden, who were quite put out by having someone landing in the middle of their carefully tended fungus. They responded in the obvious manner, by attacking Griff with rakes and pitchforks.

The fight that followed stretched Griff to his limits. He was forced to fight defensively, trying to prevent the gardeners from striking his comrades while they were vulnerable and clinging to the vines trying to climb down.

Just as Erioch reached the ground, and while Fartacus and Garnet were still climbing down, noises were heard in the darkness. Something else had heard the noise and was coming to join the fight.....

Next time..... the Great Hunter and the Laboratory...