My WoAdWriMo project is nearly finished, and I'm already playtesting it. I think I've easily beat the 32 page limit at this point (although page count is a bit confusing, since I wrote the thing using an online word processer at http://zoho.com). It's around 16,000 words, and it has 4 pages of maps, that may soon be turned into 5 or 6. Since my regular gaming group is in the end-stages of our long campaign, I decided to playtest this with strangers online, using a fairly well-known virtual tabletop program. I put out an ad on tuesday, and so far have had two sessions (and a total of 7 players) on Saturday and Sunday. The largest session was on Sunday during the day.

So here are the session recaps, and some notes.

Session #1:

Optimizing for Online
When I was writing the adventure I hadn't originally planned to run this online, so a few changes had to be made. Specifically, I had to strip the grid layer off of all of my maps so that they could be used more readily with the online gaming tabletop I wanted to use. I'm probably going to lay it back on for the final submission, but provide the stripped versions as well.

This turned out to be pretty easy. My dungeon is 4 levels deep, and I put the finishing touches on the 4th level about 15 minutes before the Saturday session was about to begin.

Characters
In my online ad I asked for 1st level 32-point characters from any legal WOTC source, but with the understanding that this would not take place in any established D&D setting (so not Eberron, and not Forgotten Realms). I was prepared for people to make mistakes on this, and a couple of people did.  One guy made an Eberron character, and one guy was a bit upset that he didn't make a shifter (which is normally an Eberron race, but could also be considered baseline D&D since the race appears in MM3). Perhaps my ad was worded a bit confusingly. Finally, one guy showed up and said "I hope you didn't mind, I prefer to roll my stats". And he had a bit higher than 32 points, but he had also reduced one stat to 3 ( the standard point build scheme doesn't take into account points for scores below .

So with the Eberron guy, I just made it clear that whoever he was, he wasn't in Eberron for this adventure.
The guy that wanted to make a shifter was told he could make one if he wanted to. He decided he'd stick with his bard.
And the final guy just adjusted his stats a bit until he had a 32 point build.

Issue: Avoiding the dungeon!

In the first session they only had 3 players, and one player was especially paranoid about not having a rogue in the group. (It wouldn't have mattered much, as the dungeon I had created was not particularly trap-heavy). They were down to a cleric, a bard, and a gnome wizard.

So they avoided the dungeon at first. Thats ok, really.

Lets Explore Town
I had already created a small town setting as part of my adventure that was just a "few miles" away from the dungeon. Presumably they would be going back and forth to the town to sell stuff, buy new gear, get healing, etc.  

So in the context of this first adventure, and because I had one ready- I just let them go around town while I improvised some small missions. I had about 5 missions in mind, and many of them tied back to what was happening in the dungeon anyhow. They latched onto one of the missions "investigate grave disturbances at the town cemetary" pretty strongly, so we went with that.

They walked around town, meeting and greeting NPCs, gathering clues, hearing rumors, and investigating grave disturbances. They set a trap for, and later ambushed a pair of carcass-eaters (a type of feral rat-dog found in Libris-Mortis) that were digging under the fence.

Then the PCs hired a tracking dog (meeting with a local farmer) and tracked those two beasts back to (where else?) the opening of the dungeon, where I had a couple more carcass-eaters. They battled the final two.

And that all took about 3 hours. The village priest rewarded the group with a bit of coin and a healing potion each, and then I doled out XP. Nobody levelled, at that point.

Session #2 was a lot livelier. (See below)

Into the Dungeon

The second session had 5 players show up, which included two of the guys from the previous day. They were all healed up, and the two from the previous session had re-equipped using the money from session #1. I think this re-equip phase is kind of important, so I don't want the players to miss out on it.

They started this session after going over equipment lists and doing that "in-character introduction" thing D&D players always seem to do.

What we had: half orc barbarian, human druid, elven bard, gnome wizard, dwarf fighter.

Initally the elven bard sort of took over some leadership roles in the group, but this soon passed in a casual way over to the players of the barbarian and the druid.

They started out heading into the dungeon through the main entrance (I have another hidden entrance, and in my 'home version' of this mod I am combining this  dungeon with a laterally linked dungeon so that there will be a whole other way in and out.

They moved in cautiusly and made good use of formation tactics.. and discovered the first room, which was empty. They stopped and had a discussion about the best way to explore. They settled on a tactic of always taking the passages that went to the right.

My dungeon is set up for wandering encounters (1 check/hour) so I thought this would be a good chance to make the check. And an encounter came up, so this first empty room was as good a place to spring it as any.

The monster that came up was a hostile Stone Spike- a kind of simple elemental. These are throughout the dungeon, but centered around an area where they are being summoned. I had it wander in, and then attack. The Spike disintegrates upon death and has an agate heart, so it's fairly good treasure.

The players handled this encounter well, despite the fact that it was an EL2 (and they were CR1). When the barbarian was badly wounded, the druid moved up to heal him, so that went well.

They moved on, clearing some passageways and mapping. The tabletop program we use (FantasyGrounds II) has a cool way of handling maps- they only get revealed as the players move into the area- you can shrink the map down for a full view of "where we are in the dungeon" or zoom right in for the tactical maps.

So they moved along, mapping, and breaking open a stuck door or two. Eventually stumbled upon another guarded area- a pair of Lemures holding down a guard-post.

This battle went pretty good as well, despite the devils having a bit of DR, and these still being 1st level characters. However, they were starting to run out of resources. The wizard used up his magic missile spells, and the bar dused his one bard-song for the day here. It was nearly time to go--2 CR1's is really an EL 3 encounter. And I had already kinda beat them up with the Stone Spike... so they were hurting.

But they made a group decision to press on to link up a pair of partially explored corridors and get to the room in the center. This final encounter nearly overwhelmed them. It was a skeletal owlbear- about an EL3. That doesn't seem like much, but for a group of 1st level characters, it was brutal. The owlbear encounter had a trick-detail to it that would have made him a lot easier: it doesn't animate to attack if nobody crosses the threshold into the room. The players tested this by trying to get its attention at first. Finally the dwarf just charged in after it, and it reacted. At that point they all closed (even the wizard!). However, they could have destroyed  it from a distance and that would have been ok as well.  

Here's where there were some tactical missteps I probably should have been a bit less forgiving of: they closed with the creature for the battle, but didn't take into account full attacks- Attacking and 5' stepping back-out would have made it harder for the skeletal owlbear to use both claw attacks. Instead they tried a concentrated flank tactics between the dwarf and the half orc, hoping that the owlbear wouldn't be able to get through AC 19. (It easily did). It then turned on the barbarian, who was at that point raging. The half orc was reduced to the point that when the rage failed, he would drop as well.

The surprise of this battle was the druid pulling out shillelagh just as the dwarf fighter was knocked down to -1, and managed to finish off the skeleton. But this could have easily gotten a lot worse.

They dispatched the skeleton in the end, stabilized and then gathered up their fallen, and dragged for the exit. I had it set up so that the village priest was doing post-dungeon cure spells for free.

Everyone seemed to have a great time! They made plans to meet again for the next session, even though I am intentionally running the dungeon as an "open gaming table" (I'll take the first six players out of anyone who shows up at the right time). And they pooled their treasure to buy a wand of cure light wounds (to be used by the druid and the bard, and eventually the cleric).

I've updated my "home version" of the module to reflect the cleared rooms and account for other stuff and I'll have another report next week.

Stay tuned for the dungeon background and a sample room or two!