Castle Amber Recap - Part 1

On our first day of this adventure we had three players and roughly 5 hours to play. In 1.5 hours the characters each made two characters whose levels had to add up to 8 ( 2x4th level or 1-3rd and 1-5th etc...). We also rolled to see if they had any magical items entering into the adventure. The party ended up with two scrolls and a few potions.

Here are the gallant PC's:

Gyric Greymane (5th Level, Neutral Mage, wears grey robes, likes to cast lightning bolt and levitation)

Lokidus (3rd Level, Neutral Elf, fights with daggers, was invisible for most of the adventure)

Dakon Darkblade (3rd Level Lawful Cleric of the Church of Karamiekos "in good standing", had a crappy constitution score and only 12 hit points, made up for it by wearing plate mail :)

Neil Mankenzie (4th level Neutral Thief, had a sweet constitution score of 17 and 19 HP!!! we rolled up that he once fought Dwelifane to a draw in the city of Specularum, they became friends after that)

Dwelifane Nonendyl (4th level Lawful elf, this character rolled really good stats having a 13 strength, 14 Con, and 18! dex. In battle he favored the two handed sword and the long bow)

Harkidurm Battlerock (4th level Neutral Dwarf, typical Dwarf 5 int, 7 wis, 4 chr, but... 16 str and con!, he rolled really good HP having 37 HP at 4th level he had some stats change up by the adventure and also gained the innate ability to use ESP, although with his low INT and WIS he is not sure how to use this, also he gained a permanent +4 bonues to poison saves giving him a save of 2...)

NPC:

"Higgin's" 1st Level Lawful Caravan Guard (Fighter)

I added Higgin's because I thought it would be nice for the PC's to have a torch-bearer - I named him Higgin's as an homage to Roll For Initiative. He met his fate at the hands of spell casting spiders.

The Adventure!

The PC's found themselves on horseback riding as hard as they could to escape a dragon that befell their party at the foothills of the Cruth Mountains as they braved a passage through the mountains leaving the Grand Dutchy of Karameikos and heading toward Glantri.

They ran from this dragon for hours until they were sure it was no longer chasing them. After some greetings and roleplaying the group made camp on a hill in the night. They awoke to find themselves in Castle Amber.

On our first day they explored the West Wing engaging in a boxing match with a magen and having tea with an insane Ogre that thought it was an elderly woman. They killed two wraiths with a lightning bolt and found over 10,000 gp of treasure in around 3.5 4 hours of play. There were a couple of really cool encounters I'm going to elaborate on in future posts. For the next adventure I told them that they could reach make one more character since I was worried about having a TPK in a single encounter.

Overall - everybody playing was happy with the B/X system. None of these guys have ever played anything before 2nd edition AD&D, and have played a bulk of their gaming in 3rd edition. They really liked the loose and quick method of play and one of them wanted to borrow the books and read up about basic DnD. He remarked, "wow, this version of the game is great for getting together, making characters, and starting the action all in the same day! I had walked into this figuring most of the day would be character creation and we ended up with over three hours of game play!.