Bennettj: Created page with "'''Continued From Session 15: Lokos Valley''' ==[https://www.patreon.com/u3015466/posts/session-16-one-170559775 Original Page]== All right, it has been a while since I..."

2026-10-29T19:58:14Z

Created page with "'''Continued From Session 15: Lokos Valley''' ==[https://www.patreon.com/u3015466/posts/session-16-one-170559775 Original Page]== All right, it has been a while since I..."

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'''Continued From [[Session 15: Lokos Valley]]'''

==[https://www.patreon.com/u3015466/posts/session-16-one-170559775 Original Page]==

All right, it has been a while since I weighed in on D&D, given all the events from last week. The deepest kicker of all was learning that because of the established stroke, Tamara could not count herself an insured driver again until examined in at least thirty days and medically approved. We learned this having driven to the hospital, not insured, though we did not know that at the time. This meant abandoning our car at the hospital last Friday, paying for a full day of parking and then obtaining it's relocation from the hospital to our driveway… while at the same time I was hurrying home to pick up my discord campaign on the 18th, online. I don't drive; I've never had a driver's license. I'm just not a safely focused person… so in such cases, I am no help at all.

Since we've been adjusting to the mental punch of it all, the lack of the car, the feeling Tamara has now with her health turned topsy-turvy again; while I've avoided the responsibility of writing here, especially about the last running. So, it being Friday, it's about time I got on that. We skipped a session, so it had been four weeks since our playing together.

I talked about mislaid plans relating to setting up an encounter back on the 13th, an issue I'd sorted by last week's running after someone in my circle had mentioned "flail snails," which as long been a joke staple of D&D reaching way back to the Fiend Folio. Back in the 80s, I'd thrown them a number of times at parties as "easy to slaughter staples" to fill up a dungeon now and then. The Folio's write-up is pure garbage and the creature itself not very threatening, so that my present wiki does not even acknowledge them as a creature. But I began to think… suppose the armour class were raised, and the "flail" arms lengthened so that the creature could attack in any direction, ridding the beast of a flank or a rear. And suppose, for other reasons, the creature was blessed with a protection against normal missiles and a 50% magic resistance? How would the thing play then?

Nicely, as it happens.

Thus the burnt-out village of Alsopeteny, with a 5 HD snail, armour class 1, crawling out of a mysterious hole in the earth lined with hard clay. The party engaged, found it very difficult to hit, even for those with THAC0 of 16. Then they found they could not throw things at it. Then the cleric and mage found their spells were 80/85% ineffective (+5% magic resistance for every level the character is less than 11th, plus the aforementioned 50%). Five attacks for 2-8 damage per attack, with a THAC0 of 17. Took a bit for the players to concoct a strategy, based on the snail's most important weakness. As the cleric Lexent put it, he "never expected to be able to say I fought flail snails in a serious campaign." The snails did 75 damage to the party before they went down, for a total of 4,400 x.p. distributed. There was no treasure.

But, to explain the weirdness of the snails and their unusual abilities, the party discovered by going down the hole the apparent workings of a mage who was studying "something" which they weren't able to find out yet. They did plunder a lot of papers, which they gathered over about an hour and a half, with Mikael the mage giving directions… only to then find out they'd been gone down the hole for five days. Their followers were keeping a vigil. This is where we ended the session.

Thus, not that much to tell. Fight, get banged around, actually keep giving ground because no one knew for sure what to do… then solve the problem and take the snails down one by one… then figure out the hole, plunder the papers and get out. That's it.

The end follows the advice of this post. The encounter hasn't led to treasure, but Alsopeteny is "cleared," at least so far as the players know, and they have information that will take time to examine. There are perhaps an endless pile of enticements in those loose sheafs of paper: one of them the party already knows about, called the "Meselo." One of them has probably thought to look that up already, knowing that my game world is so often based upon the real… but in fact, that won't help all at once, because of what that thing is and what it looks like. I invite the reader to have a search themselves, to see what they find.

So, I am sorted on the party's chosen hex; I have both "ruins" sorted, I have a nice supply of expositional material, I have other things to find, I have the means to build a continuity among the entities in the area… it's the best I've felt about them entering this "Lokos Valley" hex. I shall of course continue to keep up descriptions of our game in the future, while the players are clearly stoked to keep it going—more so than ever, perhaps, despite this having been our eighth month of playing.

'''Continued on [[Session 17: Hunting, Hunting]]'''

Session 16: The One with the Flail Snails - Revision history

Bennettj: Created page with "'''Continued From Session 15: Lokos Valley''' ==[https://www.patreon.com/u3015466/posts/session-16-one-170559775 Original Page]== All right, it has been a while since I..."