Full Metal Dungeon Crawl

Last night, Gene didn't make it to our gaming session, but we decided to forge ahead without him. We joked over the course of the evening that I was carrying his character around on my back much like Chewbacca carried the disassembled C3P0 in The Empire Strikes Back. We needed the character, you see, as he was the one with the wand of healing. There really wasn't a whole lot of full-metal to last night's session. We were in full-on dungeon crawl mode. After we blasted through the crypts last week, we decided to head back to town and see if we could track down the last remaining witch's tomb. That turned out to be pretty easy, as she was buried on hallowed ground where the church could keep an eye on her. Father Dumas led us outside his temple and pointed at the tomb, right out there in the open. We decided to plant ourselves at the tomb and wait to see if anything happened. Eventually we spied someone looking at us from across the courtyard. Before we could react, she ran off into an alley. We immediately pursued, but came to a dead end. Fortunately, our rogue's sharp eyes found a crack in the pavement which we eventually managed to force open, revealing a passage down into the sewers. Once again, we starting charging through the passages, attacking anything that moved and taking nearly anything not nailed down. Our plan this time was to continue to go straight on any passage until we finally hit a dead end, then backtrack to the nearest intersection to try again. Much better than last week's "Batman always turns right" rule. We lucked into finding a room down there which had been recently inhabited. In fact, the main inhabitant, Father Dumas's niece Alexis was there. We moved to get her, but she fired off some kind of powerful spell that held the rogue and dragon shaman and put my fighter to sleep. She monologued a bit to let us know what was going on, that she was bringing back the witches' coven to seek revenge on the town for killing her mother, the coven leader. She asked us to tell Father Dumas she was sorry, then escaped past us. As soon as we were all mobile again, we set off in pursuit, blasting through the passages. Before long, we got cocky about potential traps and my fighter was just throwing doors open left and right. Maybe half the rooms had rats or zombies in them; both kinds of monsters were swiftly dispatched. We came across a couple of tombs deeper within the tunnels; apparently the tunnels under the graveyard connected in with the sewers somehow. We eventually came to a room with a water-filled chasm dividing it. A rickety rope bridge spanned the chasm. Naturally, we sent the rogue across first, after tying a rope around him should he fall. Instead, he was attacked by tentacles from above. He managed to work himself free and flee across the bridge and out the corridor on the far side. My fighter decided to simply charge straight across and trust his ability to break a potential grapple. Sure enough, he made it through, but just barely. He rolled a natural 20 to the DM's 19. The dragon shaman came next, and got caught up briefly in the tentacles, but also worked his way free. The corridor ended at a marble door that turned out to be the opening of one of the tombs back at the church. We decided this was a good stopping point for the night and tallied up our XP. Not enough to level again, but we're getting closer. I had a great time, despite this not being high role-playing. Sometimes, all you want is a good, solid dungeon crawl, and that's what this module is giving us. We're tending to play stereotypes as well, which is fine. It means that whenever any of us does miss, the rest can pretty easily figure out what that character would do in a given situation. It's very much a low-stress, very entertaining way to play, and just what we all seem to be there for. I look forward to next week.