Thusdays in Thracia RELOADED Week 2

27 Feb, 2026

First, a retraction: in my last post I accused my players of being "story-game sickos" who I needed to coach towards OSR style play. One of my players actually read the post and objected to this characterization. Despite publishing multiple story games, Sam Roberts cut his teeth on AD&D2E and has played many an OSR game, he is a regular advocate for the style in other indie circles and needs no coaching.

Introduction

This is a play report of week two of my ongoing campaign of Jenelle Jaquays' classic module The Caverns of Thracia. The title of the post is a reference to the classic play report series Thursdays in Thracia by Chris P. Wolf. Last session's play report can be found here.

This session we added a new player character, Rory a Human Race-as-class (Fighter), played by the inimitable Richard Ruane of R. Rook Studio and Plus One Exp. Now that I'm done name dropping...

Escape! From the Gnoll Patrol

When we ended our last session our "heroes" had just passed through a secret door and south through a hallway where they were confronted by a turn in the corridor, a door, and a gnoll standing guard. The Gnoll immediately pounded on a wooden panel behind them with the but of their spear. Iskios (our halfling thief) being in the lead was first to react, he ran to the door and pushed it open, revealing... many more gnolls! The party won initiative and decided to make a break for it. Grumble the Half-Orc Fighter bull rushed the guard gnoll, shoving them against the wall where the corridor turned again, he took a spear shot for his trouble, and the rest of the group ran past.

Unfortunately there was no time to check for traps so Lalandra the Elf Cleric stepped on the disguised pressure plate, two spears were launched up the hall one striking Lalandra down. Fortunately Grumble reacted quickly and pushed the guard in front of the second spear, killing them.

With the yipping and braying from the guard room, the group knew they had to get moving post fucking haste. Luckily for Lalandra, Simon the Halfling Wizard knows Floating Disk, so he conjured his disk under her prostrate form and the group made a break for it. The gnolls gave pursuit, but the party had enough of a head start to run south around some bends, back through the big square batshit room, and out of the dungeon where they stabilized Lalandra.

A night in the village

The party trudged an hour and a half back through the forest to the nearby village and rested. Luckily for them Shadowdark characters heal to full with a good night's rest. They also met up with their party member Rory who they'd left behind on their first delve.

At this point I had the players roll on the rumors table, they got:

• 3. Beware the yellow death!
• 5. Local tribes still perform human sacrifice.
• 7. Beware the God of Death!
• 8. The once-famed rope bridges beneath the city are now rotted and unsafe.
• 10. The hall of laughing skulls leads to riches untold.
• 12. Deep under the earth lies the ancient sunlit garden and sparkling palace of King Argos II.

We also discussed the inhabitants of the village. Most of them speak only Modern Thracian, but a few have learned Common and are able to translate. They are largely distrustful of outsiders, but have allowed the party to sleep in a communal barn and share in the villages food. I explained that the villagers respect obligations of hospitality, but their patience would wear thin eventually so the party gave a few coins to the headman. The villagers have to purchase any iron they need from the city, so all they have available for trade are rations, torches, rope, and sacks. Before next session I'll flesh out 3 or 4 villagers for the players to interact with with more granularity, but for now it's back into the dungeon!

Down the hole again

Upon returning to the ruined city the party decided to investigate the black stone structure south of the temple under the suspicion that it concealed another way down into the Caverns below. As they skirted the crumbling temple of Athena they discovered a sinkhole. 5' in diameter the hole dropped straight down deep into the earth, at the bottom was the faint flicker of a torch.

Simon decided to investigate. He tied a rope around his waist, cast Feather Fall, and leapt into the hole. At the bottom he discovered a columned mezzanine hewn from the rock wall of a great cavern. To the east was a corridor carved through the rock, north a stone bridge across the cavern, and west a semi-circular platform extending out over open space. On the platform were three posts with cross bases and ropes, well sized for tying people to? Soon after Simon's arrival he heard a sound akin to the flapping of bat wings, but significantly... larger. The sight of something the size of a doberman flapping through the air convinced Simon it was time to go, so his companions pulled him back up the hole.

The party elected not take a route with dubious escape potential and searched the black stone building, easily finding another set of stairs. These stairs traveled straight down and east, terminating at a hallway that took a right angle turn to the north. Carefully peeking around the corner the edge of Rory's torchlight revealed another enormous cleft and one end of a rope bridge. Upon approach the bridge formed a t intersection (N,S,E) in the middle of this cavern and despite the rumors, the bridge looked well maintained. While the rest of the group watched Rory stepped out onto the bridge. The light of the torch disturbed more of the giant bats! So Rory chucked the torch over the side where it briefly illuminated a large flat cavern floor before bouncing into an underground river. With the bats pacified the party slowly picked their way across the rope bridge and through the east exit. As Rory was about to light up a new torch we decided to wrap up out session instead of starting a new torch timer.

My game

From a referee's perspective I especially liked the opening encounter for of the session, probably because I stole some Chris McDowall tech to smooth it out. When Grumble's player wanted to shove the guard gnoll out of the way I consulted Chris's Action Procedure from Mythic Bastionland:

1. Intent: Shove the gnoll out of the way and hold him while the party escaped.
2. Leverage: Jordan described holding his greatsword at either end and using it to shove the gnoll against the wall.
3. Cost: None here.
4. Risk: I thought that was reasonable, but told him the gnoll would get a chance to attack him with their spear.
5. Impact: Instead of making a strength check or attack roll I decided Grumble's gambit would just work, instead of making a save to avoid risk like in an Oddlike I rolled an attack for the gnoll. It hit, dealing 5 damage to Grumble, but was pinned and eventually fell to the spear trap.

I probably won't use Oddlike task resolution (i.e. the PC does the thing and we roll to find the consequences) in substitution of every traditional stat check, but in this instance it did a good job of moving the action along at a fun pace.

Things to work on for next time

1. I forgot to do a proper debrief again, so I don't have the information I need to dial the game in to my players preferences, but everyone had a good time, so I must be doing most things right.
2. Simon's player, Justin, was trying to improvise an explanation for how halflings would think about and discuss distance and I cut him off, telling him that he could just talk in feet and yards. This is exactly the sort of worldbuilding I generally encourage, but I was trying to move the game along. I wish I'd let him riff, because unlike some of the other table chatter from the session this was a player actually engaging with the game's world through his character's eyes.
3. Write up some village NPCs.
4. The surest way for me to finish something late is to have a deadline. I intended to publish this post more than a week ago, but instead of writing it I watched a bunch of James Bond movies. I'm not writing for anyone but myself, so I need to give myself permission not to think of this blog as a chore. Hopefully that works.

Outro

I published another post on how I'm houseruling Saving Throws and Morale for this game last week, you can read that post here. I promised some Punnett Square stat blocks for a few of Thracia's more common encounters, I'll be finishing those up and posting them shortly. If you have any questions about this post, Caverns of Thracia, or my campaign feel free to ask them on Bluesky.

All images taken from Original Adventures Remastered: Caverns of Thracia by Goodman Games.

#tags: session report #thursdays in thracia