A one-shot adventure with pregen-characters:
– Yorvik, the male dwarf fighter,
– Mordrun, the female dwarf cleric (in fiction: his sister)
– Lanthalven, the female elf-MU
– and Magnus, the human fighter.
all of them already between levels 3 and 5, so not really weak, but not yet giants among men either.

Our merry band of adventurers was sitting in the classic Inn, seeking warmth in the grim winter, when a nobleman came in and sent us on a little quest: there was a fortress outside of town, and there were rodents and other things there, which we should clear out, because he wants to use the place for some festivity or similar. Our reward: whatever valuable stuff we find in there is ours to keep.

Female Dwarf’s Lib

Sounded great, we said yes, and so we stalked through icy wind and snow and reached the dark fortress with its ice-slated roofs, surrounded by a deep moat. We went up to the tall gate and pushed it open.

We found: One double door led straight into the center, two small doors led north and south along the massive walls. We decided to stay closer to the outer walls at first — when two crazy barbarian dwarf women came out of the north and south doors … and raged! They yelled to aim at killing the men, and Yorvik was the first under attack. Recognizing a fellow dwarf, he started out defensive and called “Yo! Stop, sister! What’s wrong!?”

His armor saved him from a very earnest attack, but he was not keen on spilling dwarven blood, so he aimed to disarm the potentially just confused warrior.

His sibling Mordrun helped him overwhelm the dwarfesse, while the elf caught the second with a Web spell. Sadly, we were unable to understand their reasons, they seemed to be tasked to kill all men by their feminist queen; and there was talk about a magical stone the men had brought in as well, before they had been killed by their own tribe.

Working theory: Maybe that stone had turned the mind of the women towards mass murder?

Sadly, it was hard to keep up the conversation between their struggles to break free and their demands to *our* women to help them kill the men because “that’s the only way!” Then Numero Uno started to yell loudly — for reinforcements.

Remember the season!!

Brother and Sister wanted to cool down their crazed captive and physically pushed her down into the moat so she could shake off her spell(?), but the rash duo had forgotten about the biting cold… dwarves are tough, they sometimes forget uncomfortable environmental conditions. As it stood, the water in the moat was actually covered in a fat sheet of solid ice, and the poor barbarian hit that hard surface with a lethal velocity.
Yorvik looked down to see her broken body slide through the cracked ice and sink, never to be seen again. As the ice re-formed he exchanged a look with his sister and said: “Ouch.”

When the second feminist also yelled for her friends, the elf-maid Lanthalven and mighty Magnus decided to follow the dwarves’ example: they shoved that one down the moat too… but not head-first. She survived the fall, but the GM ruled that she ended up unconscious with broken bones — let’s hope she is tough and does not freeze down there now.

Aaaanyway.

Scoutin’

We went back in and chose south, where Mordrun listened at the next door and determined that the room beyond contained a larger number of orcs and hateful chittering goblins!!

The vile tongue of the ancestral enemy made her skin crawl, yet with us only four, we decided to leave that room for later.

We did not have the skills to pick the lock to the central room, so we went north, found an empty room with some hidden coin, then went east, where we found another way going to the center, but the door radiated unnatural cold in a really weird way. Magic at play? We kept going to look for a stairway that would lead up to the top floor, so we could get a look into that extremely cold courtyard.

Traps & ambush

Mordrun ran into a deadly trap!! Luckily, she made her safe narrowly, by 1, and made a headlong dive back to safety at the very last instant. The trap was still dangerous, so Yorvik used boards to create a platform to walk on, so we would not need to roll saves navigating the wreckage. But there were voices! Someone was coming. We quickly pulled back, removed the platform, and clever Mordrun organised an ambush.

Four more feminist barbarians came into the room, saw Magnus farther down the dark corridor, and immediately stormed forward to kill him. Thus, they ran headlong into our ambush and the first two of them got slaughtered.

Each of them took 3 to 4 hits to take down, which we were able to deliver quickly in the ambush, but which suggested they may have had L3 themselves.

The last two chose a strategic retreat, and Yorvik counseled that we should get out of that mouse trap before they got a chance to surround us with their goblin allies. We went out and around the corner, where we looted the dead, but they had nothing worthwhile.

Second storey work

With no pursuit coming, Mordrun suggested we climb up from the outside, where we saw two windows. Yorvik threw the grappling hook in and monkeyed up the rope. He discovered a room that seemed very recently vacated, where some weapons and cards lay around.

Seeing an opportunity, he quickly entered and threw the readily available items out the window — among them a nice amount of gold.

How much time was he willing to invest?
Not much, since the room seemed so recently left — which meant someone could return any minute. One look around: no chest, no wardrobe, no immediately visible thing.
Nope: He slid down the rope, taking the hook with us.

Profit

We discussed the situation.
Our quest was based on false info: this fortress was heavily defended by valid numbers of barbarians and greenskins, while we had expected giant rats and cockroaches. And we were only four. So far, we had been lucky: no casualties, actually not even any wounds suffered!, only one of our spells spent; and we had looted a bunch of nice weapons, some playing cards, and 90 gold.

Going slow and steady had paid off quite nicely, we felt, after two hours of play.

We decided to quit while we were ahead, and went back to town to tell the noble to be realistic and hold his festivities in the longhouse, not in that crazy keep.

And we also went ahead and spread rumors about that fortress and its man-killing (potentially item-cursed?) barbarians, so other groups of adventurers may form up and go there with proper prep to find the source of the aggression and restore a more dialogue-oriented mindset in yonder dwarfesses.

Approach matters

As a final info, the GM informed us that the same adventure had gone very differently the last time he had run it with a different group of players: this other group took heavy losses early, pulled in reinforcements, and then suffered a TPK.

Our results were nigh-unrecognisable as the same adventure. I’d say that’s the power of

• OSR tactics (i.e.: stop, look, listen; using equipment and local materials to mitigate hazardous conditions; preparedness to retreat and re-evaluate approaches; regarding combat as a failed state)
• and luck!