Haunted Halls of Eveningstar: Delve 2 - Panic! In the Privy

In which the party fights a series of horrible bugs in ruined bathrooms and recovers a surprising haul of magic items. They find barely any money.

A Week In Town

After a week spent scrimping and saving in town in order to afford their rooms at the Golden Unicorn (Eveningstar’s 2nd-best inn) that Trigg needs to recuperate, the party is back on the trail towards Starwater Gorge and the Haunted Halls.

Tansybell got some part-time work in the inn’s kitchen to cover her expenses, while Sassaran went to camp by herself in a stand of trees off of the High Road. Old Dolf blew through his pocket money halfway through the week and then philosophically returned to sleeping in haylofts, scrumping, and bothering people for money, which is more or less what he did before.

I got my OSE town prices from Carcass Crawler #2, which also has a Wood Elf class that I decided to use for Sassaran – the main trade off here is getting the Fighter’s attack bonus and an additional +1 to-hit with ranged weapons in exchange for losing turn undead.

The Halls

Now that the party has alerted the kobolds and opened the portcullis, I’m using a d6 wandering monster table, where a 1 indicates a kobold patrol and a 6 the hunting owlbear.

I’ve also decided on a solution for the empty rooms: I’ll roll a random room from the upper level of the adventure module B1 In Search of the Unknown, with a 50% chance to contain treasure and a separate 50% chance for a monster from the relevant tables at the back of that book.

Modeling their behavior on my old high school friends’ exploration method, the party’s goal on this delve is to double-check the areas they’ve already been to before braving the obviously dangerous doors in Area 8.

Solo D&D: The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar -- Delve 1

There are many kobolds, but Sam Wood's 3e one is mine

THE HAUNTED HALLS

In which the party is nearly slaughtered by an owlbear in the very first room, avoids green slime and a giant spider, fails to search an unusually treasure-filled toilet, wanders around long stretches of empty corridor and battles some elite rootin’-tootin’ crossbow-shootin’ kobold guards. They do not find any money.

OUR HEROES

Trigg Sunbold, fighter 1: aspiring hero and party leader

Gimwort of Greydelve, dwarf 1: a doughty young dwarven warrior

Sassaran, elf 1: aloof elvish archer, doesn’t speak common

Eldred the Enchanter, illusionist 1: weak of body but sound of mind

Tansybell of Merry Meadow, halfling 1: a lass of great courage but little ability

Old Dolf, thief 1: how is this stupid old coot still alive?

Solo D&D: The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar – Session 0

I’ve been reading and listening to a couple of fun solo D&D games, and for various reasons (mostly work and the schedules of my friends’ young children) have been slow to deliver on my promised 2025 D&D game, so I decided to try a solo adventure myself as a form of journaling game. I'm writing everything out by hand and developing my format as I go, which has been surprisingly satisfying. The party has now survived three delves, and the record of their exploits now occupies eight sheets of printer paper.

I’m a bad perfectionist when it comes to designing things or running games for other people, so I decided to start immediately – I’m using OSE from the SRD website and I’ll be playing The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar, an adventure that I’ve read once but haven’t wasted a bunch of time thinking about what I’d like to improve.

I know I’ll be using a couple of house rules:

• Max HP at 1st level.
• Ascending AC.
• The “Smoothed Attack Progression” table from Tales of the Rambling Bumbler.
• Slot-based encumbrance of 10 +/- STR
• My own Tolkien/Iron Age Armor, which lives on the Notes app on my phone:
• Leather: +1 (can be worn under mail)
• Mail: +2
• Helm: +2
• Shield: +2
• Elves progress as Clerics but without any weapon or armor restrictions. They still get the Elf’s incidental class features and use the Magic-User’s experience chart.
• For easy bookkeeping I'm giving bonus XP from prime requisites at the start of each level up, rather than modifying XP yields in each adventure.

Where appropriate I’ll use a simple “Yes/No” oracle on a d6 (high for yes, low for no). To simulate group discussions I’ll roll the oracle die for each character to get a “party vote”.

Now to generate some characters. I wanted to use a party of six PCs, and I wanted a Fighter, Magic-User, Thief, Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling, so I decided to roll six sets of 3d6-in-order attributes and then assign the classes. I then distributed equipment based on a vague sense of balance and aesthetics. I didn’t use any of my prized name generators, instead inventing names by drawing from my own ideas of light-hearted vernacular fantasy. I started with pretty basic sketches of these guys, but their character bios have been fleshed out over a few sessions of play by now.