Lords of a Ring: An OSE Session Log

Beneath the crumbled ruins of the Jeweler's Sanctum, an adventure in Volume 1 of the OSE Adventure Anthology, there exists a Queen of Rats. Skilks, as she has called herself, has accidentally slipped a magic ring onto her finger. The ring is a trap - it grants the wearer basic sentience, the ability to speak common, and little else. It overwrites the user's previous operating code, so to speak - a rat will have its brainpower enhanced with these skills but a human(oid) will be reduced to them (to model this more concretely, the ring reduces intelligence to 3). 

Skilks is a gracious queen to the 5 giant rats that follow her (none with magic rings of their own), and eager to trade with visiting diplomats from other nations (i.e., wandering adventurers). She is pretentious and ambitious but utterly naive and basically harmless. 

The same could not be said for Norrin the Illusionist, a player character with a lust for the magic ring. The party went through an extensive trade session where the party obtained valuable trinkets and information about the dungeon in exchange for food and a magic scroll (in reality a technical schematic, but while Skilks is excited to learn magic, she cannot read and took the party's description at their word). At the end our ambitious would-be Lord of the Ring cast color spray, knocking out four of the rats for 4 rounds and stealing the ring for himself (the fifth rat, frightened and confused, fled the scene). 

Norrin was, of course, disappointed by the Ring of Imbecility. He did not, however, return it to its rightful owner. A fellow party member stealthily liberated Norrin of his mental affliction by deftly removing the ring and keeping it as a cursed item for the party to give to someone they didn't like later down the road. This is, of course, theft, malicious intent to defraud, and the deliberate destabilization of an independent kingdom. 

Imagine my joy when, 2d4 rounds later, the party triggers a random monster encounter: 1d8 giant rats. Of course, there is no need to roll that 1d8, as the number of giant rats the party would encounter has been provided by the party themselves right next door to their current room. And so as they return to the hallway the Rat Queen, just intelligent enough to realize she has lost something since the tall animals approached her, attacks her foes in a desperate bid to get her ring back. 

Combat ensues and the rats roll remarkably well in initiative and drag most of the party into melee. The Rat Queen, unbeknownst to the party, is statted with AC 6 and 18 hit points - far sturdier than any of them 

Sitting astride the hallway just to the east of where the party is fighting desperately for their lives is a checkerboard of 2x2 black and white squares. This checkerboard activates a scythe trap whenever one of the white squares is pressed. Our level 1 Illusionist jumps across the black tiles, having learned the secret of the trap sometime earlier in the adventure, hoping to lure the rat queen that is chasing him to her death. When her turn in the initiative order came, I looked at the party and announced "It breaks my heart to do this," and rolled to see if she activated the trap. It broke my heart because she would activate it on a 5-in-6 if she lacked the intelligence, as she does now, to figure out the pattern. 

She rolled a 6. Despite it all, the ring had left just enough of a trace of intelligence that she could follow her enemy's footsteps and emerged safely on the other side. At this point she is bloodied and almost broken, but not dead. It's life or death now - both she and the illusionist have but 2 hit points left. Whoever lands a blow first will almost certainly win. 

The rat queen wins initiative. She strikes. Natural 20 - full damage. The thieving wizard falls to his death. 

Her victory is short-lived however, as she succumbs to a blow from another adventurer while she spends her turn sniffing through the Illusionist's robes searching for her missing ring. The tale is over - the two would-be Lords of the Ring lie broken on each other's lifeless corpses. 

It amazes me that none of this was planned, and yet purely through the greed of a wizard and lucky rolls, the party recreated the basic outline and moral point of one of fantasy's most legendary stories: lust for magic rings that don't belong to you ends in tragedy.