the Shattered Empire: Session 2

Last Sunday night I had quite a surprise as some of my players showed up expecting to play. So I quickly set up and after a few minutes we started playing. The session started off when the party was attacked by a giant spider while camping out in the dungeon. They're sentry, Theron, was the first to encounter the beast and shouted for the others. After a few rounds of throwing javelins, and dodging spider webs he was joined by the rest of the party, including a new member. This cleric had come from the far north, more or less, "Russia". Well they quickly finished off the spider and in the morning started they exploration of the dungeon level.

From the stairs they entered into a room with three corridors leading off in all directions, except the one that the stair came from. The rest of the relatively short session was devoted to exploring a series of rooms that used to be storerooms for the old palace, before the cellar was expanded into a dungeon. They encountered dire rats, found some treasure, including a chest in a secret room. A particularly notable encounter was with some hobgoblins (recall that in my campaign, hobgoblins are the smaller version). They did not attack the PCs immediately and the PCs decided to parlay. For 1 gp each they got permission to travel through the goblins' territory and were offered a place to stay the night. The group opted to hide in the secret room however. They also learned of a second, chaotic group of goblins that worked for a minotaur that laired in the dungeon. They then began to explore other parts of the dungeon, and found a "T" intersection just before we decided to call it quits.