Oct 29., 2017   /   True Dungeon

Kingkiller Themed True Dungeon Experience

I braved True Dungeon at Gen Con because it was Kingkiller themed this year, and Patrick Rothfuss was involved.  You can read the high level description of the two scenarios here:

https://truedungeon.com/how-to-p…/item/80-2016-event-details

This is an account I wrote down immediately after going through the scenarios:

True dungeon isn’t really my thing, but I braved it for my love of KKC. (Don’t get me wrong, TD is very well done, but I personally prefer less crunch in my LARP’s.) I deliberately played a bard (buff character) so that as long as I sang, I was helping the party but could spend all my time scouring the scenery and chatting up the NPC’s to see what I could learn. This was also the character class with the monster lore skill, so I made darn sure to check on every monster. There were several small points of interest. I thought rather than keeping them to myself, I would share with other fans:

(I am trying to stick with facts of what happened or what I believe the game was trying to convey, and at least not in this post speculate on what the lore implication was.)

In Newarre, there were three kinds of scrael. 1-The normal black scrabbly ones we see in the book. Just did damage. Their legs weren’t just sharp, they had truly pronounced knife/sickle blades at the ends of their feet. 2-smaller red ones that jumped on people. I’m making inference from what the mechanical effects in TD were, but I got the impression that they were trying to burrow into people and take them over. 3- a giant white queen. She made a web at one point.
I am not sure if this was mentioned in the book or not, but they have very triangular heads. A lot like the shadows in Babylon 5. Also, in one lore check I was told that the scrael were not just fae, but also constructs.

We also had a puzzle to put together Tehlu’s path through Temerant. Unfortunately I can’t remember the city names. Only a couple were familiar.

We fought a Draccus. As you might expect it was attracted to fire.

The Newarre scenario was really interesting but I didn’t learn a whole lot else. Got to flirt with Bast so that was fun. 🙂 The only other possibly interesting detail I caught was that Bast was really insistent we needed special torches to go through the woods. Seemed to be a story thing, not a mechanics things.

However, in the fae scenario, I learned a lot.

We did see Felurian but she was what you’d expect. We were guided through the fae by Felurian’s servant. She had blue shadowy skin and long white hair. She did have her own unique name, unlike the other NPC’s I encountered (other than ones known from the book). Unfortunately I don’t remember it exactly. It sounded like Ellarre. [ I was later told by a staff member that the NPC did not have a specific name, the actors could make one up.] Towards the end of the adventure she led us to a room with a big stone golem. She stole the fiery heart out of its chest declaring that she would no longer be a slave to Felurian or the fae nobles. (FYI, the way to defeat the golem was to extinguish the fire in its chest.)

Our first combat was in a maze room where we were told the fae enjoyed gladiatorial entertainment. We fought Old Holly. He was a jolly but dim-witted old tree man with a long beard, and seemed to think this was all just a game. (He was vulnerable to fire but that was probably more game thing-he was made of wood- than a lore thing.) I think the only thing he said, other than laughing was: “Old Holly have fun!”

There was also a big black bird creature called a Daruna. It could speak. It was grumpy and working on what looked like a puzzle or magical creation. The GM made a point that it was ignoring people who weren’t close to it. I think this may have been meant to imply it was near-sighted. (Also I am not sure, but it seemed particularly aggressive towards me. Perhaps because I was singing so it would maybe support the idea that it went off sound more than sight.)*

We fought a creature of pure shadow. It was very powerful. This was after our fae guide had run away. In this room there was a necklace hanging on a pillar. It had beads that looked like they were carved from bone or ivory, with flower symbols on them.

In the last room (before the moon opened up a path to send us home) was a pure white fae (even her eyes were white) in a tattered white dress that was quite insane and obsessed with the moon. She was singing madly and capering about. She was upset and lonely because the moon wouldn’t talk to her. She wouldn’t give me her name. I’m not sure she remembered it anymore.

Sorry about all the forgotten details, but it’s not like I was given time to stop and write things down.

*Someone later pointed out that in WMF Chapter 125,  one of the owners of Caesure / Saicere killed two Daruna. I suspect these are also the “men who had been bent halfway into birds” in Old Holly.

(Cross-posted to The Kingkiller Chronicle Facebook group)