This is a play report of a minidungeon written by Mellonbread. I used the opportunity to playtest the Begone FOE! Funnel ruleset, which I updated to the most recent version of the game here.
With the collapse of the City of Tontes, the Marble Cliffs have become anarchic. Petty lordlings reassert their authority, controlling the surrounding landscape from fortified keeps. The Beggarmen, an entrepreneurial gang of lumpenproles and rural bandits, has started a ransom racket out of a stolen castle, kidnapping random people to sell back to their loved ones.
People like you. You've spent months in a smelly cell, being tortured by bored jailers who demand a ransom that probably isn't coming.
That was until a cannonball came through the ceiling.
The castle is under siege, and you've got a way out. But if you fled now you'd just be another batch of faceless nobodies on the frontier. And being penniless losers is exactly how you ended up in this situation to begin with.
The cannonball augered through the wooden ceiling, richooteed off a support column, and crashed into the cell door of the Jailbirds. Pausing to ogle the warped orb of gunmetal, the motley collection of refugees, petty criminals, and sharecroppers set about freeing themselves. Several cangaceiros had fallen from the room above them, landing in a tangled mess of broken bones. With them came a spread of useful equipment - a musket, a pistol, an ax, and a crossbow with a matching pavisse.
One of the Beggarmen was still alive, so Jacob the Canonist bound his injuries and laid on hands. Awed by the unexpected mercy, Corisco the Cangaceiro explained that he had no idea how the besiegers got a cannon up through the mountains, the surrounding cloud forests were filled with hidden sentries and boobytraps. Before fleeing through a nearby escape tunnel, the bandit warned the Jailbirds against opening the nearby oubliette - they'd trapped a Ghoul inside to harvest its paralytic hands. They'd lost a magic ring down the pit, but getting devoured alive wasn't worth recovering a magical bauble.
The Jailbirds immediately set about negotiating with the trapped undead. Once they'd bribed it with long pork from the dead Beggarmen, it proffered them the ring as a reward. Deuce the Hedgemage stupidly bit down on the thing to test its value, contracting hepatitis and releasing a flash of light that illuminated all the bones in his skull. Grinning like an idiot, he donned the Ring of Light.
Unsatisfied with one magic item, the Jailbirds tried their hand at harvesting a Ghoul claw. Luring out a questing limb with the promise of more carrion, Dunsin the Factotum brought his ax down and severed its hand. Tib the Highwayman strapped the paralytic claw to his musket as an improvised bayonet.
Thusly armed, the Jailbirds exited into the central courtyard. The unpaved ground was choked with mist, but otherwise well-lit by the smile of the moon above. The muffled sounds of combat echoed around all them, interrupted by a sonorous voice calling out from the fog that enraptured several Jailbirds with its song. That was until the singer got clotheslined on spiderweb strung above the courtyard, breaking the spell. The Harpy wore a brightly coloured uniform and had a bandolier of grenades strapped to her chest. She tried to worm out of the silk net, but the Beggarman sentries riddled her with arrows.
As the winged woman bled out above them, the Jailbirds snuck into the main keep. The floor of the entry hall had collapsed into the dungeon when the cannonball struck, and a steel gibbet hung precariously above the hole. The naked man within begged the party for help, saying he was Mountebank, a financier from Brickmountain captured by the Beggarmen for ransom. The Jailbirds freed him and gave him a tablecloth to cover himself with. Mountebank ingratiated himself by identifying Deuce's new magic item, and warning them off opening a room full of rats.
The Jailbirds cracked open a different door into a bedroom filled with alchemical reagents. As they looted, they found another magical ring and a blued sheet of vellum illuminated with white strips - a clerical scroll of Logic, god of planning and careful decision-making. Mountebank weakly identified the ring as a protective talisman, so Deuce donned it and promptly screamed in pain as the cursed item cinched shut on his finger. Their newest recruit shrugged meekly, apologising for his fuckup.
The next room held a shrine to O Sun, god of chivalry and honourable combat. The altar to the solar deity had been reconsecrated to Great Moon, goddess of treachery and underhanded tactics. A pile of treasure was pooled at its base, attracting suspicions of traps from the Jailbirds. They settled on pegging rocks at the money pile, resulting in the fetish of Great Moon falling over in a clatter of metal. The offending Jailbird felt the eye of divinity upon them, but somehow avoided anathema - the goddess must have found their bumbling iconoclasm amusing. Tib tried sticking his claw-bayonet into the pile and promptly triggered an oversized rat trap that mutilated the ghoul hand into uselessness. Grumbling, he sifted through the pile and made out with a diamond-encrusted necklace - the rest of the treasure was worthless counterfeits. Unsure where the Beggarmen's true horde was located, they asked Mountebank who assured them it was in the southernmost tower.
As the Jailbirds snuck back out into the courtyard, shouting came from the gatehouse. A panicked Beggarmen patrol fled through the gates, a detachment of crimson-skinned cavaliers in hot pursuit. The portcullis slammed down behind them, trapping the horsemen in the courtyard. But the armoured Hobgoblins were undeterred; shouting battle prayers to Marrow Bone and laying about with sabres, pistols, and grenades. A caster among the cangaceiros cast Sleep, but the Hobs' stirrups kept them in the saddle and they were soon shaken awake by the movements of their horses. The Jailbirds decided against joining the chaotic melee and retreated back inside the keep.
Chocolateknife
The second floor was a large feast hall, filled with the unfinished remains of the night shift's meal - corn fritters served with alligator pears and alpaca meat. None of the cutlery was worth looting, but the severed head of a Bronze Golem mounted on the wall certainly was. The decapitated construct was incredibly heavy, so the Jailbirds settled on throwing it down the stairs, the noise of the melee below disguising the horrible racket it made on the descent. The door to the battlements was trapped with a poisoned spike, but the outwards-facing boobytrap was easily disarmed. Peeking outside, they saw another heated battle between Beggarmen and a company of Orcs trying to scale the walls with siege ladders and grapnels. Cursing their luck, the Jailbirds settled on looting the keep's upper floors.
Crossbow-packing cleric Theodora snuck upstairs towards the distracting noises of a woman and several men having sex. Peeking around the stairwell, she saw a 10' tall arachnid woman being milked for venom and spiderwebs by the oiled hands of two cangaceiros. The Drider was loudly complaining about the men being too rough with their finger-fucking, for which they profusely apologised. But they badly needed more ammo if they were going to fend off the greenskins' siege.
Theodora reported back to the Jailbirds, and the party decided to bushwhack the trio of Beggarmen. They burst into the room and the cleric's arbalest canoed the spider woman, dropping her instantly. The first bandit went down to a concerted hail of bullets and ax strikes before he could reach for his weapon, so the second threw up his hands and surrendered. He soon engaged in a heated argument with 'Mountebank', who was really Rutherford, a drunken Beggarmen imprisoned for stealing liquor. Angered with the betrayal, the Jailbirds disarmed both men and tied them up with the dead Drider's webs. Theodora used the milked venom to poison some of her crossbow bolts, and another Jailbird packed the remaining spiderwebs into an oiled set of bellows for later use.
The adjoining room was the bedchambers of Witte Piet, the leader of the Beggarmen. Ignoring the piles of ransom letters and cooking recipes, they settled on looting a glass cabinet filled with expensive liqueur and spices. The armoire was unsurprisingly trapped with a Save or Suck poison and Winnifred the Priest dropped dead, foaming bloody spittle from the mouth. The surviving Jailbirds looted several bottles of aguardiente and an ornate jade phallus.
The next room was proof of Rutherford's duplicity, containing a vast horde of riches. Gnomish clockwork, Goblin silver, erotic pottery from the Old Empire, Commonwealth trade tokens, even a donations box stolen from Jacob and Dunsin during their capture. Suspicious of more traps, the Jailbirds examined the treasure and noticed it was dripping wet with an unknown substance. Testing revealed it to be a magical adhesive, enchanted to adhere to anything biological. The stone floor was safe, but anything wooden, leather, cotton, hempen etc. would result in a cascading series of superglue accidents. Tib and Deuce pooled their magicka to summon a pair of Floating Discs, scooping up the majority of the sticky treasure. The other Jailbirds wrapped some smaller pieces of loot in layers of burlap, trusting they'd be able to find a solvent at some point.
Treasure in hand, the party offered rewards to the restrained Beggarmen if they told them how to remove the glue. But the bandits refused to help the adventurers. Jacob asked them why they bothered to hold out hope, Great Moon clearly didn't smile upon them. Rutherford spat that she may yet.
Reanyx
Retreating back to the ground floor, the Jailbirds miraculously avoided running into more Beggarmen, even after they threw the bronze head into the dungeon below. Peeking out into the courtyard, they saw the dismounted Hobgoblins had handily dispatched the cangaceiros with minimal casualties, and were in the process of clearing the gatehouse room by room with grenades.
Carefully dropping into the dungeon, the Jailbirds used their looted spiderwebs to drag the golem head behind them as they entered the escape tunnel. The underground passage was pitch black and flooded with knee-high water, making progress slow and noisy. After some debate, Deuce burned a charge from his magical ring to light the way, but it wasn't enough to detect the ambush waiting for them.
Rounding a corner, the Jailbirds had half-a-dozen gun barrels pointed in their faces. A grinning greenskin proudly announced to his troops that they needn't bother storming the keep from below, some kind souls had delivered the treasure straight to them. Hurried negotiations stopped the mercenaries shooting the Jailbirds dead there and then; the Orcs agreeing they certainly didn't look like Beggarmen. Before the monstermen could finish their bickering over whether to just rob the Jailbirds, or murder them and then rob them, Tib cast Sleep. The soldiers fumbled with their weapons to kill the caster, but the spell washed over them first. Most of the green men slumped against the stone walls sound asleep, but two faceplanted into the knee-deep water and spluttered awake.
Theodora shot one with a paralytic bolt, sending him crashing back into the water to drown. The second ate a brick to the snout, stunning it long enough for Dunsin to close the distance and open his neck with an ax blow. The victorious Jailbirds magnanimously left the unconscious Orcs alive, but looted their breastplates, helmets, and falchions. All the powder was soaking wet, so the guns got left behind.
The tunnel terminated in a scraggly copse of alder trees, half a mile from the walls of Castle Hornachos. By the time the Jailbirds made it to the exit, the night raid was all but over. The rising sun illuminated the banner of One Ear, a mercenary band of monstermen no doubt hired to take the fortress back. High above them, Grady the Manticore - the Jailbirds' cruel warden - fought a doomed rearguard action against a vengeful flock of Harpies. Just then a mail-clad warrior appeared atop the southern tower, fending off a squad of Orcs. Grady terminated his dogfight to scoop the swordsmen up, evading the pursuing Harpies. The Jailbirds hid inside the escape tunnel until the manticore and his passengers were out of sight, then hurried away from the doomed castle themselves.
They'd escaped capture with a small fortune in tow, but they weren't homefree yet. Miles of lawless wilderness stretched between them and the dubious promise of safety. And of far more immediate concern: their Floating Discs were about to expire. They needed somewhere to stash their sticky treasure, else they'd lose half if it when it adhered to the jungle floor. Hours later, they spotted a promising field of andesite boulders with enough overhangs and narrow crevices to hide their loot.
It was Theodora that saved them all from instant death. Be it a whistling in the air, a strangle reflection in the clouds, or divine providence she screamed a warning and dived prone. A volley of razor-sharp spines rained from above as Grady the Manticore strafed the thieves. Even with forewarning, Deuce the Hedgemage dropped dead, impaled through the chest, and Dunsin the Factotum was badly maimed.
The manticore landed and disgorged a pair of levelled adventurers: Omer the Cleric prepared a casting of Hold Person, and Witte Piet knocked an arrow to his bow. The master thief couldn't helped be amused by the Jailbirds' daring heist, and offered to let them live if they returned his rightfully stolen treasure.
Tib and Phalo grinned and agreed. Before any of their pursuers could react, they upended one of their Floating Discs directly overhead - showering the trio in gold, silver, and Universal Adhesive. Omer panicked and fumbled his casting, Grady's wings were too heavy to take off, and Piet's bow was useless smothered in superglue. The surviving Jailbirds cackled maniacally and fled with the remaining loot into the cloud forest; the Beggarmen's screams of rage gradually receding behind them.
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