The Theme For the Second Session of Rappan Athuk - "Focus"

Yep, the party fought a room full of Giant Rats.
The treasure recovered was:
20 gp, 100 sp, 231 cp, a silver necklace, a worthless fork and a spoiled potion.
Somehow the party was expecting 2,000 cp...

I've referred to DM'ing for my group as occasionally resembling the act of herding cats. As a group, we like to socialize, catch up, tell funny stories, talk game design - when you have a gaming group full of creatives that only gather via G+ Hangout once a week, it isn't always easy to get them to focus on the job at hand.

They are currently working their way through Level 1C of Rappan Athuk - The Mouth of Doom. The have covered the east, north, west and south - all that is left to explore os the center of the Tootsie Pop. Not bad for 2 sessions of gaming.

Last night they were focused. I mean really focused. Cracking jokes left and right but men with a mission. Well, until they got sidetracked by the "slot machine" room. I think they very well might have stayed there until they ran out of coin if they had come close to hitting it big ;)

I'm enjoying Rappan Athuk. Heck, it's already given us 2 nights of gaming and we haven't even finished the first level they've come across (they have found 2 ways to go down 1 level and 1 way to go down 2 levels - next week's session should be interesting.

The players are enjoying Rappan Athuk too. I see it in the focused play. I see it in the desire to figure out the traps and puzzles. I see it in the amount of ground we cover in a game session. What takes us 3 hours now would take us over 5 previously.

I have found one thing - I need to pencil in the monsters' THAC0 numbers alongside their entries - the few times I've had to look something up, it was that.

As an aside, I find the OSRIC monster section annoyingly organized by type, which makes it hard to flip through and actually find what you need quickly. A minor quibble over an otherwise excellent book.