So, six hours later...

[Warning: Possible Stonehell spoilers below]

The Stonehell party consisted of 3 players with 2 characters each, one was their primary and the other would be their secondary, in some cases this ended up with a master servant thing going on. The party was:

Boris, Human Fighter (Female, played by Amanda)
Ms. Gentleman, Human Magic-User (aka Ms. G, played by Amanda)
Jesus, Human Cleric (Played by Dave)
Tarquin, Elf (Played by Dave as a MU)
Agent Smith, Human Paranormal Effects Administrator (MU played by Giz)
Manservant, Halfling (Played by Giz)

The players had heard about how fatal older editions of D&D (and its retro clones) could be, and armed with this knowledge were incredibly cautious.... Ish. Manservant insisted on crowbar-ing every door he came across and Boris was a bit of a bimbo but they bumbled on quite well; meeting Dwarves, sleeping Orcs and generally performing a bit of murder whilst their enemies were sleeping.

At one point Boris found a rat with a name tag (which read: 'Precious'), instead of killing it she took the sleeping rodent and muzzled/hogtied it, runing it into her unofficial pet/mascot. Later the party surprised me by being ambushed by a group of orcs and wisely running away, back to their Dwarven 'allies' who took care of the mess.

There was a long period of exploration in which we discovered that I could roll more than a 1 when it came to rolling for the Hp of some cobras and the party eventually made it to the caves section killed some kobolds and took their precious guano.

Their next encounter with kobolds was random and was another work crew carrying mops and buckets, there was a brief roleplay encounter that left Giz twitching with the urge to kill everything in the room and put their eyes out. I obliged him when he fiddled with the cracks in the same room and lost his 10' pole for his trouble. Giant Centipedes were by far the most dangerous foes the party encountered with Agent Smith hitting the deck unconscious before the party fled into the fountain room.

They rested and then headed down and around to reach the entrance and then went back to the fountain room with the intention of heading through to the centipede room. Then Boris decided to touch the fountain (perhaps because I pointed out that whilst they had been in this room they hadn't 'explored' it) and activated the poison gas trap. She survived by Manservant and Jesus bought it.

Fortunately Jesus would return d3 days later, assuming we don't get smote for blasphemy.

The party (deciding against the centipedes) then went to the wheel of fortune room, which was always going to be a giggle. Ms. Gentleman pulled the lever first, I rolled up 'Wisdom' which I had dubbed the Exp bonus and went straight up to level 2. Agent Smith pulled the lever next, got the Bloody Eye and was instantly struck blind.

The last room dealt with was the crypts which the party raided in style, hacking down the few monsters there were (including no less than 2 ghouls) and finally gaining some good treasure for their troubles (about 600 gold and a magic item, which I ruled was an elven sword +1) and most of them reached level 2.

The party then fled the dungeon and went back to the town to spend some time carousing, healing and getting the sword identified. Due to their carousing several characters went up to level 3, in no small part due to the large sums of gold they had randomly acquired.

All in all it was a good session, and now that I have a handle on the rules I think it's time to do a little 'brewing' with them; I'd like to expand the spells list a little so that characters can have a few more interesting spells at level 1, especially for the cleric, who was relegated to doing very little. I'm also tempted to use Jeff Rient's carousing rules and I could also do with some reaction tables (given that I just fudged it this time).

All in all though, given we started character gen at 2.30pm and finished at about 9pm it was a damn good session and one of the longest I have ever run, so in short, it will be occuring again.

Next week is World Top; involving the party's stint in Zendicon and possibly the arrival of a new ally.