Dungeon Crawl Classics # 45: "Malice of the Medusa" (Part 3)

See Part 2 here.

Sometimes a little luck goes a long way. This session began with the PCs arriving at Scorpion Rock, the fourth dungeon in Malice of the Medusa. They went inside Scorpion Rock briefly and saw that the first chamber was partitioned by a deep chasm. This was enough of an impediment that they went back outside and decided to follow the tracks leading away from Scorpion Rock, which led directly to the fifth and final dungeon in the module. Although the PCs had no way of knowing it, there really wasn't anything of value at Scorpion Rock and they managed to skip several encounters. Their luck got even better as they approached the fifth dungeon, which would normally be entered by a cave cut into the side of a hill. On the top of the hill are the ruins of a tower made out of a glossy black surface. One of the PCs went up to the top of the hill and poked around, and stumbled upon a secret passage that led to the second level of the dungeon--which allowed them to skip the entire first level! And then their luck held, as they carved a fairly direct path to the final battle against Ssedenka, the big-bad of the module. Ssedenka proved to be relatively easy prey, as she didn't have much firepower and had to rely on Charm or Hold Person to whittle the party down (and the PCs kept making their saving throws). It wasn't a short final battle, but it also wasn't a difficult one.

So with the PCs having skipped one dungeon and the entire first level of another, they finished the module a full session earlier than I had expected. On the whole it was a solid hack n' slash module, if anything a bit too easy (it's advertised as suitable for PCs of level 1-3, and the PCs I ran it for never encountered major combat difficulties even though they were level 1 through the whole module). It served as a good introduction to the genre to the two almost brand-new role-players I ran it for, and it was interesting that they split in stereotypical ways: the guy by far favored the combat-heavy nature of D&D, while the woman favored the role-playing and investigation heavy nature of Call of Cthulhu.