Yesterday, I've started running Skerples' Tomb of the Serpent Kings with my friends, who have little to no experience with RPGs (we have played some one-shots) and absolutely no experience with OSR.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with OSR, my suggestion is to read Skerples's Introduction to OSR and/or Matt Finch's Quick primer for Old School Gaming.

Since ToSK is system-agnostic, I decided to go with Lamentations of the Flame Princess, partly because it was at hand, mostly because it has a lot of nice materials to play and I hope my friends will keep playing. If you are not familiar with LotFP, there is a free PDF on their website.

Obviously, this post will contain spoilers from TotSK, so, if you are planning to play it, just skip. I hope it will prove useful to those who want to run it, so they could learn from my mistakes and the party reactions.

Game recap

I was playing with five friends, which means we spent about over 2 hours in making the character sheets. Since it was already late, I decided to skip the introduction I had prepared and deposit them at the entrance of the dungeon with a quick narrated backstory: they had been hired by a nobleman to find a missing archeological expedition on the area and the tracked the dungeon entrance thanks to their reports. I think the part about archeology stuck far too much in their minds, since what happened next.

The party is composed by: one Halfling, one Cleric, one Mage, one Specialist and one Elf. They have a lot of magic for a first-level party, but are pretty bad in fights. They know that and we are all ok with it.

After entering the first level, they ignored the guard tombs, without inspecting more than a passing glance. The sorcerer tomb got their attention and the silver ring was the final touch. They decided to get the ring, the Cleric and the Specialist thought it was probably useful in the lower levels, while the Halfling, the Elf and the Mage wanted it for the money. They though there was a trap, even if they couldn't tell what, and the Specialist convinced the other (on basis I cannot fathom) that the other statues will animate and attack them. The Mage suggested to shatter the statues to disable the trap, but they decided against it. So they prepared to fight the whole level at once and the Elf broke the sorcerer statue's finger. I really liked the Elf's face when I told her to roll against Poison.

Once they got the ring, the Cleric and the Elf fixated on it for a while. In the meantime, the rest of the party discussed about shattering the statues. At first they decided against it, because this was supposed to be an archeological site. Things changed when the Cleric got his attention on the medallion found in the statue, and said that it could be useful in the lower levels (again, on basis I cannot fathom, but I didn't correct him - they will learn). Assuming that all the other statues would contain poison as well, they used ranged weapons and the Halfling's really good vs Poison save to minimize the risks. While the others were busy smashing statues, the Elf put the ring on her finger, activating the curse.

Next came the barred door at the end of the corridor. At first they decided to simply lift the bar and enter, but once they learned that at least three of them were needed they smelled the trap. They really didn't know there was a trap, but started searching for clues. They searched the whole wall, then tried to pry away the pegs with a crowbar (failing the roll, so nothing happened), then tried to pull away the pegs by tying ropes to them and pulling. Since they made a good roll on that, I decided to let them know that there was some mechanism at work over their heads when they moved the pegs. Panic followed. They tried to investigate the mechanism, but there wasn't a character with a Tinkering score good enough to pass a roll. Since they couldn't find a way to disarm the trap, they decided to find a way to trigger it from a safe distance. The Mage used Floating Disk to lift the bar (I don't think that should be possible strictly following the rules, but it was a good idea and we had just spent half an hour on that bar, so I ruled it possible whithout checking the manual). Thus they entered the false king's tomb.

Here followed another debate about what to do with the coffins. Again, it was a debate between those who thought about the archeological site and those who wanted to investigate (and loot) the dungeon. Things got more interesting after the Halfing studied one of the brides' coffins and heard movement inside. Now the debate was three sided: it was an archeological site and thus was not to be disturbed vs there is a menace inside and we need to take it down before moving on vs those trapped inside might even be the archeologists. After about ten minutes of debate in which no one moved from their position, I interrupted them to say that the hammer trap had reloaded. The Specialist then suggested the same use as in the module: prepare the trap to spring and lure any enemy that get out of the coffin right into the trap.

They set up the trap by placing to PCs (Mage and Specialist) to hold down the pegs with their weight (which prepped the hammer) and the pushing them up at the right moment. The Halfing went down the corridor ready to shoot anything that survived the hammer. Cleric and Elf opened the coffins. While the two brides went out easily, one by one, the king poised more trouble. They didn't manage to open the coffin with a single push, so they had first to fight the single claw that kept trying to hit them when they got near to finish the job. They decided to cut the claw and, after a few attempts, the cleric managed to pulverize it with a good it of his mace. After that, they opened the coffin, but didn't manage to get away in time. Since the Halfling joined them, they fought three against one (and their opponent had even lost an arm), it was an easy job. They learned that swords were less effective against skeletons than impact weapon.

After looting the tombs, we finished. Skerples suggests that if the first game starts by creating the characters, the session should end after finding the passage in the false temple. Since we are a room away from that, I'd say we are pretty much on schedule.

What I got wrong

First of all, I think my first error was in the backstory: the idea of an archeological expedition might be good, but maybe they should have been the expedition. They are too much bound by the idea that somebody else is supposed to explore the dungeon and thus find it too difficult, to perform the most destructive parts of dungeon exploration. Maybe this is less an issue with another party, but I'd suggest to keep that in mind, since the party is supposed to start smashing millennia-old statues from the beginning.

The second error, in my opinion, was in the descriptions: they weren't interested in the first statues. It was the silver ring with an hint of magic on it that drove them to start smashing the statues. After that, they started understanding how the dungeon worked.

An interesting thing is that the lesson about patterns was driven home not by the statues, but by the medallions. While they expected the statues to contain poison, after the first one, they had the time to study each medallion with enough detail to expect all the following medallions (I placed one medallion in each bride's coffin, and one in the king's too) to be the same.

There are probably more things I got wrong, but they'll emerge from the second level going on, since the first level is more about discovering how the dungeon works than actually using that knowledge.

And what about you? Did you run TofSK? How did it go? What are your suggestions for the next game?

Credits:

1. The "Tomb of the Serpent Kings" image is the cover of Tombs of the Serpent Kings v3.0