Experiences running "I Smell A Rat"?

[Michael Thayne]

I'm thinking of running "I Smell A Rat" soon, and I'm curious to know other people's experiences. How long did the thing take in total? Has anyone successfully run it in one session? How did you handle the maps? (The ones that come in the boxed set give away secret doors and the like.) Anything else I should know before running it?

[Tom H.]

These are good questions.

In case you haven't read the following threads in this forum, they have discussed some reactions to this adventure.

• Grappling
• [Dungeons][DM only]My first experience in DFRPG/"I smell a Rat"
• I Smell a Rat battle maps (spoilers)

But definitely, there could be more testimonies as to your questions.

[ConfusedDad]

I've been running it at our local game store with our regular gaming group. We have a party of seven (!) adventurers. Of our group, two have limited GURPS experience, the rest have little or none. So far we've had four separate 4-hour sessions, and we still have probably one more session to go. All of the characters were of the pregens provided.

Our group tends to talk and semi-role play a lot, and with 7 characters this can stretch things out. We absolutely love playing this way though, because everybody is engaged and doing stuff. The actual combats are starting to go fairly quickly now. Everyone is picking up the rules and we're having to sift through the books less and less.

I use a write-on/wipe-off mat to draw the map areas; I just use the provided map as reference. I like using an eraseable mat normally anyway.

We are basically using all the rules, so yeah, the first two sessions had a LOT of flipping through the books, but the later games are going fairly quick and smooth. The adventure is great for learning the game!

After completing this, our group wants to restart with new 100-point characters. The pregens can be a little overwhelming with options, as they are 250-point characters. I plan on converting some old D&D modules to run our group through.

Also, this is only the third time I've GM'ed a GURPS game, and again, I have to say "I Smell A Rat" really helps the beginner GM!

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

I'm thinking of running "I Smell A Rat" soon, and I'm curious to know other people's experiences. How long did the thing take in total? Has anyone successfully run it in one session? How did you handle the maps? (The ones that come in the boxed set give away secret doors and the like.) Anything else I should know before running it?

I've run two short (2 hour) sessions and we're at the rune-limned gallery. I'm playing with younger kids, though, so things tend to move a bit slowly.

I highly recommend using the sample characters from Delvers to Go (in the GM Screen package) if you're playing with people who aren't experienced with GURPS. Character creation, of course, can be tons of fun, but it's much more fun if you already have a sense of how many of the options work in play. Plus, the sample characters are excellent examples of how to craft a fun, competent delver. I think the GM screen PDF is worth it just for access to that booklet. Lacking it, however, there are the two sample characters at the end of Adventures plus the ones Kromm has been sharing recently in this forum (martial artist, bard, knight, wizard, and cleric). Actually, I would add these to the mix regardless; they're quite evocative.

After my first session with the big maps, I switched to using my old wet-erase battlemat. Based on another thread, I also added boards across the sewer from the tunnel mouth to the secret door to the rune-limned gallery. To keep the water threat, however, I made the boards rotten and hazardous. This helped indicate that there was something on the far wall, but made the water an obstacle. We had a very fun battle there with a horde of giant rats (wandering monsters).

I ran things pretty fast and loose with the rules, taking to heart the sage advice from Exploits: "don't lean on the rules" and "just wing it."

[GnomesofZurich]

I ran my first session with this adventure last night. Party of 5 adventurers (although one opted to stay up with Lee to secure the door) were beset upon by 4 huge spiders. The players either have no or minimal prior GURPS and roleplaying experience, and each opted to build their own character rather than using a pre-gen. The characters are mostly at the low end of the optimization scale.

I was worried for a bit that I was going to end up with a total party kill - three players were unconscious at various parts of the session, the fifth party member eventually joined in. Notable moment was when the holy warrior jumped from the stairs down into the webbing, tripped doing it, and ending up face down in the webbing. After 4 hours of play they had only cleared enough of the webbing to rescue the gnome thief that one of the spiders dragged away, and retreated above ground to re-negotiate with Lee, with plans to return after rest and healing.

There was a fair amount of book flipping as people get a handle on things, but everyone seemed to have a good time.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by GnomesofZurich

the holy warrior jumped from the stairs down into the webbing

One lesson I learned is that somebody always wants to jump. Another is that jumping never ends well. Even when I said, "You'll take 1d+2 crushing and end up stuck in webs," the response was, "Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I jump." :)

[Michael Thayne]

It sounds like this is a ~20 hour job. Did the group at GenCon Kromm ran run two full days?

Originally Posted by Tom H.

These are good questions.

In case you haven't read the following threads in this forum, they have discussed some reactions to this adventure.

• Grappling
• [Dungeons][DM only]My first experience in DFRPG/"I smell a Rat"
• I Smell a Rat battle maps (spoilers)

But definitely, there could be more testimonies as to your questions.

One thing that stuck out is Kromm wishing the players would read pp. 18-25 of Exploits. Maybe I'll turn the corresponding pages (pp. 6-9) from Dungeons into a print-out handout, one copy per player? Are there any other pages the players should really read?

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

It sounds like this is a ~20 hour job. Did the group at GenCon Kromm ran run two full days?

Nope. We ended our session when time was up. In both cases, that meant getting as far as area #6.

[ULFGARD]

My group is two sessions into this adventure. The first session was fairly short in actual game play - maybe 2 hours, if that - as it was more about character creation. The second session ran for a good 7 hours and they've only made it to area 6.

The group has 5 players, plus a NPC cleric. Three of the PCs (and the NPC cleric) are straight-up DFRPG generated PCs: Scout, Swashbuckler, and Wizard. The 4th character is a Druid, but was ported in by a player from a previous DF game, so said Druid has Rain of Nuts & Shapeshifting (which aren't in Spells) as well as a dire bear ally. Finally, there's an Alchemist - a Sage using the alternate template from Pyramid (82 I believe) who has a shield grog ally.

This brings the total number of combatants up to 8. That turns out to be a good thing, since the only truly tank character is the dire bear ally. The Swashbuckler is fantastic, so long as she doesn't get hit, and the shield grog is good at getting beaten on in place of the alchemist, allowing the alchemist to instantly brew potions for use in combat.

So given the somewhat non-standard party, this may or may not be incredibly helpful as experience goes.

The first session, I used the included maps and tried to hide the markings with little success. For that session, it realy didn't matter, since we went through two encounters, and those were more about learning what the PCs could do. They made it into the secret room and fought the flaming skull, which easily could have turned out very poorly for at least one of them, but it was the swashbuckler it went after.

I dispensed with the pretty maps for the second session. They went back and tried to excavate the hidden door, fought the spider and ran. Then they went out into the sewer. Once in the sewer, it wasn't obvious to them to look for secret doors, so they explored the sewer system. It wasn't much of a problem for me, given that I set this adventure in a homebrew world (and town) that I've been using for the better part of two decades off and on, so coming up with new maps was fairly easy. They ended up finding three interesting places to enter / exit the sewers, one of which was a public bath house.

Because they strayed out of bounds, I determined that the first "random" encounter was going to be with the smugglers so as to create a more interesting story for the smuggler's room and tie that into something that might drive future adventures. The second random encounter had them killing the remaining 10 rats, so the "mission" was effectively over.

That said, it wasn't hard to have Lee tell them that she's still interested in finding out what happened to her brother, which immediately led the party back into the sewers. I had them make a quick Vision-5 roll to notice something off about the dor to the Rune Limned hallway. Once they found it, the adventure continued in earnest.

Thoughts

The sewer crossing is a potential weak point, I think, since it is entirely reasonable for the party to want to explore the sewer as a whole. At the very minimum, this includes the boundaries of the sewer in the dungeon regardless of whether or not there is anything interesting anywhere else in the sewer. For me, it created a secondary adventure (which will end up being played out over time), and greatly increased the scope of the main adventure.

This was actually why I seriously considered using the maps as is, at least for this (introductory) game: it allows for a bit more focused "metagaming" so that the players have some idea where they're going.

In any event, it's fun, my players are having a blast. Two are new to GURPS, 2 have played in other GURPS campaigns, and the 5th player has never played a tabletop game.

My highlight? The wizard cast Great Haste on the Swashbuckler to fight the six-armed terror. That was fun.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by Tom H.

These are good questions.

In case you haven't read the following threads in this forum, they have discussed some reactions to this adventure.

• Grappling
• [Dungeons][DM only]My first experience in DFRPG/"I smell a Rat"
• I Smell a Rat battle maps (spoilers)

But definitely, there could be more testimonies as to your questions.

In regards to the web height question: I think that if I run this again, I'll use cotton balls to represent the web on the floor. By default they're about the right scale height.