First Session of B4 The Lost City

Well, had an interesting game last night. The players dutifully set about exploring the lost city. Although I gave them the pep talk about how not everything wants to kill them, they quickly settled on a policy of attack first, talk when you have prisoners.

They chased a group of Cynidiceans down to the second tier, completely bypassing any of the Brotherhood of Gorm, their first real encounter being with some hobgoblins and then a party of Warrior Maidens of Madarua. They settled on killing most of them, taking one alive, and considering what to do. It was eventually agreed that they would go meet Pandora and convince them of their resolve to aid them in overthrowing Zargon.

This was tough for me as GM. On the one hand, the party had killed four of the warrior maidens, but, then again, I figured Pandora could use the extra muscle in the fights against everyone else. To move the game along and give some opportunity to the players to engage, I decided that Pandora would give them a mission before they could become 'friends' of the warrior maidens. A quick scan of the map, and I decided to send them to kill the Draco in room 13. That's going to be for next session, but, provided the players pull it off, I think Pandora is going to manipulate them into weakening the other factions as her deniable shock troops, then sick them on Zargon.

The game went well, I had prepared by making some 1PDs of each tier, and reading through some play reports. I think I should have had some more thought put into the random encounters, so I was ready to play it out when they turned up, and some more thought into each of the factions (though I hadn't presumed the players would get this far...). I've got some more work to do before the next fortnight, but it should be good.

The players definitely seemed to appreciate the openness of B/X, and the simplicity with which it ran. For the sake of survival, I gave each player a henchman. The first was killed by friendly fire, the other by a warrior maiden, leaving only the three party members and one surviving henchman. The 'shields shall be splintered' rule has definitely demonstrated to them just how deadly this game can be at first level...