Tonight I got to DM my second live session of Swords and Wizardry. It was a continuation of last week’s game. We’re currently running the dungeon in the Quick Start guide, and now that the party has cleared half the rooms and returned to town, I started filling the cleared room with new, bizarre monsters.

In the first session, the team invaded this ancient temple and started exploring, with Timmy, a young torchbearer, and Ed, a mercenary. They found Cristina, an Elvira-like evil cleric, and with clever use of a “Sleep” spell, put her to sleep, and turned her into a sexual-slave-trap-detector-monster-bait. After exploring a bunch of easy rooms, they ambushed a group of goblins and made short work of them, returning when facing the goblin mage.

In the current session, they were recovering from the encounter with the goblin mage when they met the new PC, who was accompained by a full entourage of 5 hirelings. They started investigating again when a goblin ambush took out half the hirelings (and poor Timmy!). Having get rid of the goblins, the group had some fun at a talking statue room, and almost got killed by a pack of giant rats. Only two PCs survived the onslaught, and one of them was unconscious (Yay! my first PC-kill!)

They returned to town, to re-stock on hirelings and PCs (this time a full 8 hireling mini-army, including Barack Obama :-P), and returned to the dungeon. It was different now, though – all rooms were deathly cold, and strange translucent zombies were everywhere, claiming for “revenge” — the zombies would meld in certain places, and managed to remove and eat the brains of one of the hirelings – who later turned back into a frog zombie! Aaaie!

We finished around here… This was a “replacement” game (the main GM for our regular game was missing), so I’m not sure when I’ll get to play it again, but we had laughs and laughs during the whole thing, so I hope it is soon :-)

So I’m really enjoying this old school thing. The lightweight approach to PC death (the characters suck anyway, and it is so fast to make another one!) allows me to play more fast and loose with the rules, and have the monsters try interesting things, like ambushes and rush tactics on the players. I also invent a lot of stuff on the spot, knowing that if I make anything too broken, it is really easy to erase it later.

On the other hand, I still have to get the hang on how to deal with time and weight in order to better make sure that the party’s resources are taxed. Their lamps are almost running forever now, and they are lugging a LARGE ammount of treasure now without a problem. Also, the large amount of hirelings made things a bit… “strange”, but nothing that can’t be fixed by having the city block them from sending any more of its young men to their deaths :-)

I’ll put some links later, I’m dead sleepy now.