Session 6 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 August 15^th^, I ran the sixth session of my Hole in the Oak game for OSE via FoundryVTT. The PCs had returned to the Hole in the Oak from the town along with their two new hirelings—a porter and a torchbearer. After a little debate about their option moving forward, they chose to explore the hallway with the enchanted statue. They were quite clever, posting a retainer behind them with an oil flask in hand ready to burn any sneaky ghouls. Seeing the statue of a hunter with two dogs in between two mirrors made them quite hesitant to move forward, and they spent quite some time trying to work out how to get there. A main theory they had was that the two opposing mirrors possibly trapped the hunter (as a myth goes about witches), and they spent some time trying to cover one and then both mirrors with cloaks. Given that they were quite paranoid about the mirrors, I chose to interpret it as them not looking into them (which would activate the hunter).

They concluded that they’d done nothing bad there, and moved forward yet again to the archway with the crab spider. They were quite certain there was something there, but couldn’t quite get to a solid solution. Firstly, they tried tossing some stones into the hallway, which I figured to reward with a listen check (as they were clearly trying to bait whatever the “something” was they suspected was there). However, that listen check ended up a fail. Next, they used a halberd to try and poke the entry way, and then again the stones in front. So, I figured that was worth one retry on the listen skill, counting it as the assassin’s “listen at doors” option. Sadly, once more that was a fail.

So, knowing there would be trouble, they moved forward to have the spider drop down and win a surprise roll. Wonderfully enough, they had the magic user prepped with a sleep spell, which instantly knocked down the spider. A the rules go, that meant any bladed weapon would give it a guaranteed kill.

What Went Well

Improvising venom extraction

The assassin concluded that since a crab spider would have venom, they wanted to extract that for a poison. Given that the assassin has a specific “poison” ability, I figured that they would probably know how to remove venom sacs. I improved that as “one dose” of poison, using the “death in 1d4 turns” description from the crab spider as the result. I noticed that it was quite easy to improv because, well, that’s all there is to it. Because there’s no big structure or rule set for this, it’s easy to just label it and call for an effect. What I suppose I could have done is to argue that they can extract the sacs but that’s not the same as having the poison. It would motivate them to get back to town before some deadline I’d have to set.

Pointing our the hirelings & retainers are for the players

This session again saw the players ask me for something from the NPCs, as though they were my characters. So, when they wanted the magic user retainer to inspect the statue, they asked him via me. This time, I plainly told them he was their character, and asked them what it is they wanted him to do. They wanted him to check whether it was magical, but again I bounced that back asking how he was going to do that. I think that did spur them to think a little differently about the problem, so I think that was a positive influence.

Lessons Learned

Double-check the VTT before the game

FoundryVTT just had a big update for the OSE settings and modules. Part of that is a big update on items and monster images, as well as correcting some mistakes in the text. As it turns out, the modules that I had loaded were all depracated or moved, and so weren’t available during the session. We could still play, and it was easy enough to work with, but it was something I should have checked beforehand.

Better pokerface

While the PCs were exploring the mirrors and the hallway after, I was really enjoyin how they were going about it. I felt they were really creatively trying to figure out what the issue was! So, I apparently had a big smile on my face. The PCs took this as the smile of somebody who was waiting to spring the trap on them, so they redoubled their search. There’s nothing particularly bad about that, of course, but it would be good to keep my cards a little closer to my chest.