Grindbangers : 1st session

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Jay & Koch I got my things together and ran yesterday my first ever TB session in a Meetup event at the game store.

One RSVP dropped a few hours before the session but I managed to have 3 players at my table, I handed them the pregens with Taika, Ulrik and Beren and started playing Dread Crypt for approximately 3.5 hours (including rules rundown, delays and a break)

The challenge for me was to teach the game to first time TB players and hoping they’d keep up with me in upcoming session while improving my GMing. I announced that the start would be rocky on the event page just to clear this out of the way.

I’ll try to be brief as I’m not accustomed to writing session reports nor read them much, yet I did learn a lot reading other 1st time reports here, so many of the questions I wanted to ask have already been addressed, here we go :

  1. Rune Covered-Dolmen.
    By failing to read the runes, Taika triggered a lightning bolt shattering the rune stone, after inspection of the tunnel they all delve in.

  2. A tight Squeeze.
    Ignoring the white lesions on the yew roots they crawl through the passage, backpacks off.

  3. The Vault of Skulls.
    Taika picks up a Skull and puts it in her back backpack, Beren, who first inspected the tunnel and noticed the mark and trails found ones that led to…

  4. The Chamber of Ablutions.
    After a quick examination of the font, Taika tried to drink the liquid from the ewer realizing at the last moment that it wasn’t water, somehow Beren decides to fill the ewer but his approach wakes the Creeping Ooze up starting a conflict.

-> They went for a “capture” conflict but played that as a “drive off”, that was confusing on my part as well since I failed to ask them clearly what their goal was while explaining the rules of conflict. Quite messy, so they failed and the Ooze “flee”… yep, 3 conflict types in one… :sweat:

  1. The Altar of Ascension
    Beren starts shattering the urns, goblets, looking for valuables and tries to open the sarcophagus, triggering the spear trap, but is pulled back by Taika at the last second. They don’t inspect the room further and move on to…

  2. The Chamber of Vigils.
    Ulrik examines the room briefly and they all decide to go back to…

  3. The Vault of Skulls.
    Failing to turn the tomb guardians away, they engage in a “kill” conflict against the 4 tomb guardians before succumbing. The end.

Obviously there were GMing mistakes independent to system mastery, I also mixed up turn counts for torches with conditions, forgot to factor in backpacks during fighting actions, overlooked the Might difference between tomb guardians and adventurers that ultimately accelerated their demise, and possibly more…

To conclude, the players seemed to have enjoyed the session and the mechanics, yet acknowledged the steep learning curve. None of them had criticisms about the game itself as I always ask their opinion when running a new game/system for the Meetup group.

Anyway I’m looking forward to tightening my knowledge of the procedures and will plan another session next week.

Thanks for reading and shout out to Thor & Luke for getting me pumped about TB.

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Coolness. Nice writeup. Thanks for sharing.

To me, the most important part is that they enjoyed gaming. At the end of the day, that’s what matters most. The other stuff will come in due time.

Grind on!

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Thanks for the good words Koch !

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