Goblin Gully

I ran this one-page dungeon as a follow-up adventure to Giant Slayer for my kids using the B/X rules.  I'm pretty sure by this time they were using three characters a piece and maybe had a hireling (a longbowman) as well.  Also by this time I had plopped the setting into Wilderlands of High Fantasy by Judge's Guild, in the area maybe 100 miles north of the Citystate of Invincible Overlord.

Although not their first experience with a role playing game, Goblin Gully was my kids' first experience with something resembling a dungeon crawl, and I must say that I found them to be much more engaged with this adventure than with the prior one.  Goblin Gully is an old prison pit from long ago that a band of goblins has recently taken up residence in.  I forget how I hooked the party into taking care of it.  The Wilderlands village nearby had a chaotic-type leader who I decided didn't really give a shit if goblins were in an abandoned prison or not.  My kids were shocked that a "leader"  would be so visibly uninterested in solving a problem.  However this is a theme of the Wilderlands' setting, with the majority of human settlements being run by powerful chaotic-types rather than wise law-types.

The adventure as written (please note this review includes spoilers) described goblins as the almost sole occupants of the dungeon, except for a pudding-lite monster living at the very bottom as the "boss-fight".  I kept the goblins but threw 3 dire wolves (a significant upgrade in degree of difficulty) into the first room containing goblins, made two swords found in a secret vault +1 each, and upgraded the pudding-lite to a full-blown Black Pudding (another bump in difficultly).   I figured the Wand of Cure Light Wounds they acquired in the prior adventure should be sufficient to push them through these fights.  I had also put together a "basic adventurers kit" list of equipment that they could buy and be done with, which included two flasks of oil, torches, and a tinderbox.  When the time came I would slyly suggest using those on the Black Pudding.

The first fight against goblins and dire wolves ended with one character slain (alas poor Edric!) and the party beating a retreat out of the dungeon.  This was entirely due to absolutely atrocious dice rolling by the party combined with the higher difficultly of the dire wovles.  However, with the help of the aforementioned Wand of Cure Light Wounds, the party was able to return to the dungeon the next day fully healed, while the goblins and wolves were only partially healed.  The rest of the dungeon went quickly, and it was at this point that I realized the kids seem to take a simple joy in finding out what the next room contained, and in tension of deciding to go into room A or room B.  The fight against the Black Pudding was sufficiently dramatic, especially as one character was engulfed and had their armor eaten (the Pudding was slain before it could start eating the character). The players recoiled as the description of the Black Pudding's "million tiny mouths chewing at their armor".

The Adventurers in this session were:

Zamor, a cleric

Parry, a thief

Solyssa, a fighter

Garfield, a magic user

Jatton, a fighter

Edric, a fighter - SLAIN
Walter, a npc longbowmen hireling