Session 5 Report Hole in the Oak

Previous session report can be found here. Next session report is here. First session report can be found here.

Overall

On Friday July 18^th^, I ran the fifth session of my Hole in the Oak game for OSE via FoundryVTT. In this session, the PCs followed up on their fight with the fauns by looting them of their valuables. They figured out that the fauns had been killing and cooking whomever walked on by. Funnily enough, the party searched specifically in all the wrong places, and pretty much would have missed the humanoid cookbook clue. However, they’d pretty much figured it out, so I just gave that to them.

I rolled some random encounters during all of this, which created some fun diversions for the PCs. Particularly the appearance of a random portal was an interesting hook. The players recognized it as a portal, were tempted by the weirdness, but had to choose to abandon it in favor of following their plan.

In the last third of the session, the PCs had gone back to town. They sold of the loot and got XP for the faun’s treasure they’d brought back. Using that, they geared up again for another delve into the dungeon. They also got two hirelings: a porter and a torchbearer. In a move I found particularly cool, they chose to seek out a sage in town to help sift their rumors. For a price, and with a week’s work, the sage told them some history of the White League and Bozurah the Imperishable. They also heard that it was unlikely that there were gold statues and bronze golems in the dungeon.

What Went Well

Looking up stuff while players are shopping

The PCs first asked me about a sage to help them with their questions. I wrote those down as they were asking it, and indicated it would take in-game time. However, right after the PCs wanted to do a bit of shopping, so I gave them equipment lists, and listened in with half an ear while they were shopping. In the meantime, I browsed through the module to check for answers they’d needed.

Improvising answers

Those answers, fortunately, tied together quite well—a sign of a well-written module, I’d say. The White League had a nice hook to a serpent cult, which is evocative and encouraged them to delve back in. Bozurah the Imperishable was introduced to the PCs via a random encounter illusion, so they wanted to know more. The background given in the module is that Bozurah is a historical figure of no import. That tied well with the rumour about there being a bronze golem in the dungeon: I could get the sage to dismiss that false rumour by virtue of Bozurah being a nobody.

Lessons Learned

Random Encounters

I neglected to roll 1d6 for the random encounter table this time. I just overlooked it, I guess. Instead, I rolled the 1d20 every turn and generated the wild stuff. While that did create a lot of events in a short time, it made it all feel a little too random. Next time, I’ll have to remember to only do that on a 1d6 chance.