In the Mines of Khunmar

Tuesday night, Phil and Gabe and I decided to throw off our monthly pool game and kick back at the pub for a game of D&D instead, and we were joined briefly by Brandon. I was psyched because I was itching to run an old-style dungeon crawl. Because I had some ideas I wanted to try out, we played a homebrew mashup of AD&D and Apocalypse World.* I also got to pull out the Mines of Khunmar, a pdf megadungeon I’ve been wanting to try out for a long time. *Spoilers Follow*

Phil made a fighting man named Karl, Gabe rolled up a thief named Ebag, and Brandon created a Dwarf Cleric named Stön. These three foolhardy souls were joined by two retainers named Rumsfeld and Griswold.

After circumventing a pit, they stumbled into an ambush of Antlions, cunning ant-like humanoids with a penchant for ambushes and trickery (turns out they can also stick to the ceiling, as Ebag discovered to his chagrin). The antlions underestimated their foes, however, and after a short fight, the party had a clear passage across the plank bridge over the raging underground river chasm to the Antlions hideout. Stön had heard that the Antlions had an illusionary treasure horde to fool interlopers, but that a real stash could be found a secret room nearby so they forged onward.

After the obligatory humanoid slaughter (where Griswold met his demise), there followed a tense struggle where Ebag surprised the Antlion king on his spinning secret door throne, pinning the king’s hand to the throne controls with a dagger at a crucial moment. The heroes extorted the king into revealing his true treasure horde. They failed, however, to extract a promise of safe passage, and the king sprung the treasure’s protective trap on the adventurers, a flooding room. The evening ended with the party trapped in a rapidly flooding room with the King mocking them with mad laughter as they all prepared for an evening of drowning. I do like a cliffhanger.

Hopefuly we’ll get to pick this game up again, because I really had a blast running it, and I think the players got into it too. We might play somewhere quieter next time, though, because the ambient sound at the pub really made it hard to get my DM-ing mojo on. Writing this blog has given me a real desire to play more D&D, and I rarely do, so this was a very nice treat.

* Apocalypse World is a game of Vincent Baker’s that I’ve been playtesting. It’s got some stuff that seems very unusual, but at its core it’s more old-school than anything else. I found it surprisingly easy to mash it together with AD&D.