Reflections on a Session: 6 November 2016

• Time spent: ~4 hours
• Prepping NPC stats: 0.5 hours
• Presession henchmen and markets and whatnot: ~0.5 hours
• Running game: ~3 hours
• No new areas mapped
• No rooms restocked
• Dungeon areas explored in 3 hours of play:
• 1 lair (giant rats), cleared
• 2 monsters (cultists and manspiders)
• 2 empty
• Game-time elapsed in dungeon: 5 hours
• Random encounters: 2
• Expected random encounters: ~2.5 (not including checks from loud actions like Magical Music)
• Party composition:
• Clarence of the Stone, Craftpriest 2
• Wilgeva, L0 woman
• The Wardog With No Name
• Mule with repeating light ballista
• Scarth, MU 3
• Slagathor, Chaotic Cleric 2
• Thancharat, Elven Enchanter 1
• Rheingold, Cleric 1
• Chathis the Lizardman, Thrassian Gladiator 2
• Ascila the Assonant, Bard 1
• Dogeater, Ratman 1
•  Mortal wounds taken: 1
• Chathis took an injury to his hips and spine while cleaving through a block of cultists with polearms who used the preemptive-hit ability to attack him even though he'd won initiative.  His charge did prevent them from charging the party, though.  Chathis can no longer forced-march, but hasn't gotten the injury fixed yet because that's more of a wilderness-level concern.
• Loot recovered:
• 733 gp in silver, trinkets, and small gems from the giant rats' nest
• Three cultists captured and sold into slavery to the manspiders in exchange for a promise of silk next expedition
• Traded twenty ballista bolts this session, and a promise of ten more next session, to Scabies' ratmen for information about a trap
•  Traps triggered: 2?
• Bear-traps at the foot of a bridge were triggered and then relocated to cover a fork that the party didn't want to explore yet, where they caught a skeleton random encounter.  Considering adding bear-traps to my equipment tables.
• XP from monsters: 416
• Frankly this was somewhat generous
• Well under the 4:1 ratio, but maybe the silks next time will help balance that out.
• Exploration session avoiding humanoid lairs -> low yield

Other notes:

I forgot my map today, which delayed our start by ~20 minutes.  Derp.

The party's three clerics were very excited to see 10 skeletons come around the corner as they were trying to rest.  Maybe I should use undead more often.

Party definitely felt time pressure today exploring a moderately-distant area.  Proposed solutions included bribing the guards to keep the portal open longer, setting up a secure base-camp, and working out lodgings in Scabies' camp.

I didn't really expect them to go for the "sell your enemies to us as slaves and we'll supply you with silk" deal.  That was silly of me.  Chathis' player seems open to alliance with manspiders after discovering that they're also not from this sewer-realm, but come from Spiderworld via a dungeon portal.  Chathis got slandered again while trying to recruit henchmen, so he can no longer recruit humans and must rely purely to beasthenchmen.  Rest of party somewhat less sure about dealing with manspiders.

Plan for next session: receive silks, capture more cultists.  Plans after that include securing a staging area and going after the section of their map that the ratmen told them is inhabited by "fire demons".  Party is optimistic about their prospects there because they have an ice sword and a ring of fire resistance.  Plans to go after Bone-gnawer seem to be on hold, as Scabies' tribe are holding their ground against the ratmen to the north.

I definitely need to prep for next session.  They were right up against the stocked-unstocked boundary today.

Reflections on a Session: 29 October

• Time spent: ~6 hours
• Presession+pizza: ~1.5 hours
• Incl 15-30 minutes of restocking rooms and generating NPC stats
• DMing: 4.5 hours
• No new rooms mapped
• 2 rooms restocked, one stocked room updated
• Dungeon area explored in 4.5 hours of play:
• Five new rooms:
• 2 hidden treasure, 1 trapped
• 2 monster (both negotiated with)
• 1 trap
•  Game-time elapsed: 4 hours, 40 minutes of 5 hours the dungeon-portal was open
• Random encounters checked: unsure
• Random encounter rolls forgotten: unsure
• Random encounters rolled: 5
• NPC party, fought
• skipped while waiting for dwarfgeld under ratman fire cover
• Sewer Things, evaded
• Giant rats, subdued with Magical Music
• Masked men with polearms, evaded 
• They were pretty noisy today, and I was rolling high for encounters (if not anything else...)
• Party composition:
• Brynja, Bladedancer 3
• Crapahildis, ??? 1
• Spike, War dog
• Chathis, Thrassian Gladiator 2
• Dogeater, Ratman 1
• Wardok, War dog (lost an eye)
• Ascila, Bard 1
• Scarth, MU 3
• Rheingold, Cleric 1
• Thancharat, Elven Enchanter 1
• Mortal wounds taken: 1
• Wardok was stabbed in the head with a spear by one of the Seven Dwarves' henchmen, and lost an eye.  He was successfully evacuated while the party was waiting for Mordin the Craftpriest to return with the ransom for his captured compatriots
• Loot recovered:
• 1000 gp in ransom for captured dwarves
• Battleaxe +1, shield +1, and an unidentified dwarven divine scroll
   captured from the Seven Dwarves
• ~4500 gp in gems captured from the Janitorial Supply Closet
• Another stash of ~500gp and a magic dagger was located, but not recovered because it was guarded by assassins
• Traps triggered: 2
• XP from monsters: ~158
• Way over the 4:1 ratio, but they're about out of easy treasure that doesn't require tangling with lairs to extract

Other notes:

I considered running a Halloween Horror special, but ultimately decided that low-level ACKS in a hellscape megadungeon was adequate.

Rather underprepped.  Need to finish up stats for the Five-Finger Discount this week; the party cut the Seven Dwarves down to four, and they're going to be out of commission for a bit, so somebody's going to have to fill the NPC Party slot on the random encounter table.  I also need to reload the stocking for the cultist zone into cache; it seems like they might head that way soon.

Brynja's player seemed somewhat underinvolved, but not unhappy.

I'm not totally happy with the way we handled cleaving during the Seven Dwarves fight - the thrassian punched all the way through into the dwarves' back-row without taking any free attacks for disengaging (though he did take some for engaging spear-wielders with lower initiative).  Also man, initiative really is a decisive advantage.

Scarth's player: "Well if I were designing a dungeon to live in, I certainly wouldn't put a pit trap in the only entrance to this room.  So there must be a secret door."
Chathis' player: "That would be sound reasoning if this dungeon weren't designing by a vengeful chaos god who revels in our suffering."
Me, returning from kitchen with pizza: "Hello!  You called?"

The party was actually reasonably diplomatic today, though in both cases (the sewer-things guarding the Supply Closet and the assassins) they weren't sure if they would win a fight if one started.  In retrospect I'm a little surprised they struck first against the Seven Dwarves instead of trying to talk, but they were cornered with an insecure rear area and they knew it.  I think that was a big part of the reason they chose to make a decisive engagement there.  The party also wanted to talk to the Masked Polearm Men, but they didn't respond to hails (instead following the party at the edge of their torchlight).

An awful lot of treasure today...  but they're about out of lightly-guarded loot.  I don't think anyone leveled, but Brynja should be over halfway to 4th if I'm recalling correctly.

Referring back to my estimates on 10 September, I think my estimates were reasonable.  I projected that I had about five sessions of prepped material at their exploration rate from 10 Sept.  Five sessions later, they've cleared out and made friendly about a quarter of the area I've prepped, and explored another quarter.  If I were in charge of their mission-planning, I could probably get another 3? sessions out of areas currently prepped, but they've gotten close enough to the edges of the stocked area that they could wander out if they were uncharacteristically motivated to strike deep, or if they made an area friendly diplomatically.  There's definitely been some slowdown in new-area exploration compared to their first-session rate, though; I expected this, but did not work it into my estimates because I wasn't sure how.

It was interesting that this session they made a point of going back and filling in a hole in their map otherwise surrounded by areas they'd explored (part of this was due to currect suspicion of a secret room).  So far the sort of general progression for dungeoneering in Pox's Quadrant that we've seen was:

• Blind exploration until centers of opposition are located
• Elimination of aggressive / proactive lairs
• Exploitation: easy treasure extraction
• Consolidation: establishing relatively safe zones, filling in holes in the map and making sure there aren't hidden threats or secret routes unknown in the area
• Use as a springboard into new areas

Scarth's player commented positively on the time pressure from the dungeon portal window (the portal to the dungeon is in the duke's castle's basement, and the guards only open it for 4-6 hours at a time 1-2 days a week, which means that multiple adventuring parties are often in at a time, and if you stay too long they'll close it and you'll be stuck for a couple of days).  There may come a time when they want to go so deep that six hours will be tight, and at that point they'll either need a safe place in the dungeon to hole up for a couple of days or some very solid mission planning (possibly including reduction of gear for increased speed, and preliminary missions laying groundwork by clearing along the shortest path to their objective).

Reflections on a Session: 22 October 2016

• Time spent: 5 hours
• DMing: 3 hours
• Presession, including food: 2 hours
• No new areas mapped
• Two rooms restocked / reorganized
• Dungeon areas explored:
• Pox's Camp, now Scabies' Camp - friendly, traded
• Two new weak / vermin lairs, cleared
• Giant mosquitos
• Giant mosquito larvae
• One monster room (giant beetles)
• Re-explored three rooms in the Spider Zone
• Game-time elapsed in dungeon: ~3 hours over two expeditions
• Lost count of random encounters checked
• I rolled like two random encounters during negotiations with ratmen in a fairly safe place, wasn't sure how to play those out so I skipped them
• One random encounter that did fire was with the Seven Dwarves (NPC adventuring party of dwarves), right as the players were re-entering the dungeon on the second expedition
• Party composition:
• Scarth, MU 2 (leveled to 3rd)
• Slagathor, Chaotic Cleric 2
• Rheingold, Cleric 1
• Thancharat, L0 man (leveld into Elven Enchanter - secretly an elf all along?)
• ??? the Lizardman, Thrassian Gladiator 2
• Ascila, L0 man (leveled into Bard)
• Wardok, War Dog
• Dogeater, 1HD ratman hero with good stats, hired at Scabies' Camp.  Not allowed out of the dungeon, so stays at Scabies' Camp between adventures.  Relationship with Wardok: tense (it'd be a pretty even fight).
• Mortal wounds taken: 0
• I think I only did 3HD of damage the entire session :\
• Loot recovered:
• Traded a light ballista to Scabies for a ratman potion of healing, which they then sold to the Five-Finger Discount (NPC party of 5 sneaky-classed characters)
• Nothing bad could come of this
• Recovered around 2700gp in gems from the vermin lairs
• Identified Pox's potion as a Potion of Poison
• Traps triggered: 0
• XP from monsters: 382
• Waaay over the 4:1 ratio here
• Help I can't delete this bullet point

Other notes:

Very short-handed today, but both players were old stalwarts.  They recruited a bunch of expendable henches and did a good job of picking low-risk fights and fleeing from high-risk lairs.

We played initiative correctly today, to devastating effect for the mosquitos.
We did allow leveling of L0 mans into very non-standard classes, but that was by design (those statblocks were not meant for fighters).

Between elaboration on the Machine In the Black Sky above the rat-dimension, and meeting the same crusaders that they killed during the first session (who wanted the +3 sword back), the party is starting to get concerned about the nature of the dungeon.  Excellent.

Matt's lizardman is a killing machine.  18 Str, 13 Dex, a +3 sword, and 3 points of natural armor...  AC10, THAC0 ~4+, and 1d10+7 damage at 2nd level.  At least his Con isn't great and his HP are around expected value...  Still, he is going to be a hard guy to kill.  Between Inhumanity, the party's reputation in town for high henchman mortality, and a Slander result while trying to hire a guy, I suspect Dogeater is not the last beastman henchman he's going to have.

Speaking of which, I am pleased with the party's entrance into ratman politics.  If Against the Wicked City's party is underworld conquistadores, mine was more like Englishmen selling rifles to the natives this session.  The Brittonian South Ratistan Trading Company, or maybe Underworld Armament Imports, Incorporated.

I am a little concerned that my players did basically what I had hoped they would do this session.  I do not know if this is because they did a good job of reading me in play, or because I did a good job of modeling them beforehand.  Something to think about.

Reflections on a Session: 9 October 2016

• Time spent: ~6 hours
• DMing: ~4.5 hours
• Presession, Ethan chargen: ~1 hour (I missed Drew's message that he couldn't make it)
• NPC Plotting: ~0.25 hours
• Writing cryptic messages to players: ~0.25 hours
• No new areas mapped
• No rooms restocked (but some monsters reorganized on the fly)
• Dungeon areas explored in 4.5 hours of play:
• 1 lair cleared
• 1 monster
• Game-time elapsed in dungeon: ~2 hours in two expeditions
• Random encounters checked: 3 
• Random encounters missed: 3
• Party composition:
• Beardwin the Optimist, Craftpriest 2 (KIA)
• Clever Paul, Dwarven Delver 1 (mortally wounded)
• Kendra, Spellsword 1? (very KIA)
• Dora, Explorer 3
• Gertrude, War Dog (KIA)
• ???, Fighter 2?
• Brynja, Bladedancer 3
• Crapahildis, L0 torchbearer hired for her amusing name and total lack of standards in employers.  Likes to roll poorly on morale.
• Spike, War Dog
• Clarence of the Stone, Craftpriest 2
• Mortal wounds taken: 4
• First expedition:
• Clever Paul opened the door to a room full of ready ratmen, who charged him with spears.  He was hit once, and I rolled max damage which was doubled for spearcharge.  Party cleared the room he had fallen in, took an injured ratman prisoner, and got out.  Blinded, subsequently RL&L'd but needs a month of bedrest.  In addition to his imp, he is now at -10% XP until he levels.
• Following PC attack on the ratman village, the ratmen executed Binhildis the Paladin, whom they had captured during the previous session.
• Second expedition:
• Kendra advanced too far ahead of the rest of the party in pursuit of fleeing opponents, spearcharged for max damage.  Killed instantly and messily, some of the lowest mortal wounds modifiers we've ever seen.
• Gertrude moved to cover the party's flank / rear and was spearcharged for almost max-damage, slain (we didn't actually roll dog mortal wounds...  maybe we should next time)
• Beardwin also moved to cover the party's flank and was behind Gertrude, caught a max-damage spear charge cleave on a natural 20.  Fell onto a torch as his last action, which ignited the oil in his pack, blocking the ratmen's advance against the party's ballistae (yes plural, and yes in the dungeon).
• In conclusion: charging with spears is very dangerous, especially when I am rolling high.
• Loot recovered:
• Ratman throne of beaten copper worth ~1kgp
• 4 gems worth 150 gp total
• Ice Sword, Boots of Elvenkind, and Potion of Heroism lost on 17 September were recovered
• One unidentified potion
• Traps triggered: 0
• XP from monsters: ~270
• Loot pretty close to the 4:1 intended ratio

Other notes:

The wizard couldn't make it today, which was not really ideal timing for assaulting the ratman lair.  Especially irritating because I used the severed head of his late favorite henchman as a message-delivery mechanism before the session; I'd've chosen someone else's dead henchman if I knew he wouldn't be there.  All about that emotional investment, you know.

The players did a number of clever things.  The Darkness spell was used to great effect to limit the ratmen's ability to observe the party's actions and fire on them from the rooves of buildings.  A prisoner was taken, interrogated, and eliminated from consideration for the assault ("Friendly advice, make sure you and your gang are out hunting tomorrow afternoon, instead of at the lair.").  He provided a rough map of some areas the party hasn't explored yet.  Military oil was employed to good effect, to close some ratman avenues of attack.  The party brought two light ballistae (one repeating) into the dungeon on mules, and set them up to cover their ingress into the lair (using Darkness to conceal this preparation from the ratmen, during which the thus-alerted ratmen readied their troops).  They also had a plan to destroy the ballistae if they had to retreat, to deny them to the ratmen.

Nevertheless, the ratmen mounted a fairly effective elastic defense, spearcharging advance elements of the party (door-openers) and then retreating, and circling around to attack the party's middle.  Most ratman casualties were to ranged firepower (the Explorer and the ballistae), including the chieftain.  I'm not totally happy with my ratman tactics - I failed to develop an effective counter to the Explorer (who was previously marked as "priority one in future engagements") or to the Darkness, failed to utilize military oil obtained from the slain and captured party members last session, and did not take advantage of the roof of the portal building to ambush the PCs.

The party also made a few mistakes, all of which were basically overextensions.  Clever Paul and Kendra both advanced too far too fast, and got stabbed.  The melee elements of the party also separated from the ranged elements during the second expedition, and the ratmen tried to get into that gap (but then it was full of dwarven fire, and they were badly shot-up during their retreat).  Kendra's loss was particularly bad because she had an uncast sleep that could've prevented the two casualties from that central counterattack.  Live by the spellsword, die by the spellsword.

I did a good job rolling morale and asking for henchman morale rolls where appropriate.

Rules mistakes: we almost certainly mis-played the ballista attacks; I wasn't expecting siege weapons and didn't prepare for this at all (frankly, even after re-reading all three of ACKS Core's, DaW:Battles', and DaW:Campaigns' sections on artillery, I'm still not clear on how ballistae are supposed to work against creatures).  I expect they'll see use again.  Likewise ballista setup time (though given that they're light ballistae, I think one turn to setup is probably more reasonable than whatever DaW's guidelines would be) and light ballista ammunition costs.  I wasn't totally clear on the "closing hit" rule for spears and kind of winged it to give Kendra a dying shot, but it looks like I was pretty close.  While re-reading the init section to discover this, though, I realized that we've been doing ready/delay wrong (there is an option for it, when we thought there wasn't).  I also winged Fighting Retreat when those came up on ratman morale.  I doubled the treasure ad-hoc (in accordance with my old resolution), which turned out to be the right thing to bring it closer into balance with monster XP, so I feel good about that. Winged the rules for splash-hits with military oil, did less damage than it should've, and couldn't remember the burn duration for areas covered in oil.

Social/soft issues: we ordered food and it took forever to arrive.  People were getting tired and hungry around the middle of hour three, as the assault on the lair was in progress, and then we broke to eat in the middle of that action as things were looking grim.  Not ideal.  As usual, the mapper took charge of planning; efforts were made to involve other players with some success, but they were hungry.  I took a long damn time to produce the sub-map that their prisoner drew for the party, which depending on how you look at it either destroyed pacing or provided a nice lull between the reconnaissance raid of the first expedition and the ballista-supported assault of the second.

Reflections on a Session: 17 Sept 16

Another stats post.

• Time spent: ~5 hours
• DMing: ~2.1 hours
• Talking to players before session, Ethan chargen: 1.8 hours
• Restocking depopulated parts of dungeon: 0.5 hours
• Generating NPC stats: 0.5 hours
• Encounter tables: 0.1 hours
• No new areas mapped
• ~3 rooms restocked
• Dungeon areas explored in 2.1 hours of play:
• 1 empty
• 1 trap without treasure
• 1 lair, fought, outflanked, fled
• Game-time elapsed in dungeon: ~1 hour (6 turns)
• Random encounters checked: 1
• Random encounter checks missed: 2
• Turns spent returning to exit from further point of exploration: 1
• Party size: 10
• Scarth, Mage 2
• Aldo, Assassin 2 (KIA)
• Dora, Explorer 3
• Gertrude, War dog
• Beardwin the Optimist, Craftpriest 2
• Clever Paul (has low Int), Dwarven Delver 2? (Mortally wounded but retrieved, grudgingly loyal)
• Brynja, Bladedancer 3
• Binhildis, Paladin 1 (MIA)
• ???, Paladin 2 (MIA)
• Leitgardis, L0 normal woman (KIA)
• Mortal wounds taken: 5
• ??? the Paladin was first into the lair, surprised by a ratman and backstabbed to 0 HP.  Checked by Dr. Owl, knee damaged.  Left on the field during retreat and captured by ratmen.
• Leitgardis dropped to -100% max HP while trying to carry Paladin out, left on the field during retreat.  Wounds checked by ratmen, both arms severed, bled to death, devoured.
• Binhildis dropped to -1 HP while covering Leitgardis' retreat, left on the field.  Wounds checked by ratmen, gruesome scarring but 1HP, taken captive.
• Aldo went into a building to avoid ratman javelins and/or retrieve the paladins, rolled a 1 on damage.  Cut down by five ratmen inside, abandoned during retreat.  Checked by ratmen, DOA, devoured.
• Clever Paul followed Aldo in, missed his one shot, stabbed by ratmen.  Retrieved by Beardwin under cover of Sanctuary (first time we've seen this spell used).  Knee damaged, RL&L'd, now followed by an imp.
• Loot recovered: None
• Lost Boots of Elvenkind carried by Aldo
• Lost Greatsword +3 carried by Also
• Lost Potion of Heroism carried by Binhildis
• Ended up spending 840 gp for RL&L, Cure Disease, and healing herbs.
• Traps triggered: 1 (after discovery, but they were in a hurry)
• XP from monsters: ~84 for ratmen killed
• A net loss in XP for the party after casualties.
• About averages out last session's excellent haul.

Rough session.  But they put a fair dent in the ratman lair, and now they know where it is.

I am happy with the level of tactical intelligence employed today; last session's man-spiders should've retreated instead of engaging the numerically-stronger party, and the Delirious Crusaders the party betrayed weren't exactly operating at full capability.  Ratmen retreated from the choke-point the party decided to hold, and circled back around to strike their flank and rear via alternate routes.  Given proximity of lair to dungeon entrance and frequency of adventuring parties, rapid prepared responses seem very reasonable.  When the ratmen came under fire from the Explorer, they retreated back out of LOS rather than just sitting in the open.  They could've popped back out to throw javelins at the party as they were hauling Paul the Clever's comatose form over a rope bridge, but decided not to risk more casualties.  The Explorer is probably a priority for them in future engagements (but AC7 is hard for 1HD monsters to deal with, and she is hard to surprise).

If I'd been applying lessons in combat psychology from Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, the ratmen who killed the paladins and Aldo should've gone into forward panic and continued to advance.

Important follow-on question: what is ratman ransom procedure?  Gold is nice and all, but you can't really buy safety.  Does it make sense for them to just hold the hostages as insurance against attack by the party?  Something to think about.

Reflections on a Session: 10 Sept 16

Some fools went into a dungeon yesterday, and almost all of them came back out alive and unmaimed!  This is a novel flavor of DMing report, with the in-game events secondary to the out-of-game events.

Some stats:

• Time spent: 14.7 hours over the last week
• Actually DMing: 3.5 hours
• Chargen and otherwise talking to players, but not running the game: 3.5 hours
• Mapping dungeon: 2.7 hours
• Stocking dungeon (about half done): 2.5 hours
• Constructing random encounter tables for sub-zones of the dungeon level: 1.3 hours
• high variability
• Setting cosmology: 1.1 hours
• honestly half of this was in the shower
• Dungeon area mapped: ~80% of a single sheet of graph paper, right around 100 rooms not counting hallways
• Dungeon area stocked: ~48 rooms
• Dungeon area explored in 3.5 hours of play: 8 rooms (and some hallways)
• 4 keyed monsters, 1 random encounter
• 1 "trap with treasure"
• 1 empty room
• 1 "empty with treasure"
• 1 special (portal room)
• Assuming no retreading and similar rates of exploration in future, about five projected future short sessions' worth of material currently ready for use. 
•  ~6.5 hours of real prep (cosmology doesn't count) for 6*3.5 -> 21 projected total hours of play
• For another 4 hours of prep on encounter tables and stocking the other half of the dungeon, probably another ~20 hours of play.
• Projected amortized "real prep : real play" ratio is ~1:4 before reuse/retreading - not bad at all.
• Game-time elapsed in dungeon: ~2.5 hours (16ish turns)
• Random encounters checked: ~6
• Random encounters that I forgot to check: probably 2-3
• Turns spent returning to exit from point of furthest exploration: 4
• Party size: 11
• Mage 2 (old player)
• Assassin 2?
• L0 woman with 18 Str?
• Explorer 2 (new player)
• Fighter 2
• War dog
• Dwarven Craftpriest 2 (old player)
• Spellsword 1
• Dwarven Delver 2?
• Bladedancer 3 (new player)
• L0 woman with 16 Str?
• Mortal wounds rolls taken: 3
• Bladedancer knocked to 0HP, treated within 1 round, got up fine
• Assassin knocked to 0HP, treated within 1 round, got up fine
• L0 woman with 18 Str knocked to 0HP, got up with minor scarring, subsequently injured while in need of bed rest and killed instantly
• They got pretty lucky with all the "exactly 0 HP" bonuses.
• Loot recovered:
• ~5kgp in gems and coinage
• Three magic swords
• Magic ring
• Boots of elvenkind
• 3? potions (growth, climbing, heroism, ???)
• XP from monsters: ~600
• hm, my "monster xp : gold xp" ratio is around 1:8 instead of 1:4.
• To be fair, they did kill a high-value lair via trickery.
• In another 5-7 sessions with XP awards like this, the party will have "outleveled" the stocked portions of the dungeon (modulo casualties, slow-leveling classes, etc).  This could guide my difficulty decisions in stocking the unstocked parts.

Other notes:

Chargen was unusually slow, at around 2.5 hours.  Contributing factors: late players, new players unsure what to play, old players vacillating about what to play, same process repeated with henchmen.  Should maybe have brought pregens, pregen henchmen (especially given that new players were largely guided by Convential Wisdom from the old guard; somewhat predictable proficiency selections resulted).

Ability score rolls seemed unusually high/good (except for Drew :P Although he still ended up with a mage with 18 Int and 16 Con, so I guess they must not have been that bad...).  I'm not sure I like the "reduce other stats to boost prime req" rule, honestly; at least three of the four PCs have 18s in a prime req as a direct result.

My equipment kits saw some testing, and were a mixed success - people bought a bunch of them, and then had to decide which ones to carry and which ones to leave on the mules because they had bought too much gear and were over-encumbered.  So that's a win for resource management gameplay and a loss for time.  The simplicity and singularity of the old Starting Equipment Package was a virtue that I failed to recognize.  Maybe having a Dungeon Equipment Kit, a Wilderness Equipment Kit, and a Medkit is the right level.

New players were fairly passive, with old players plotting the course, taking the risky actions, and choosing when to enact the sudden but inevitable betrayal of the deceived monsters.  I do not know the new players very well yet; unclear if this is just a learning period before they start initiating, or if it's a personality / party composition thing.  They did both pick up the initiative system and THAC0 quickly though, which was great.

Relaying mapping information felt extra-slow due to new architectural features not seen in previous dungeons; noticeable pacing lulls (which aren't inherently bad, but not necessarily ideal for a first session where you're trying to catch interest).  Did do a bit of temporary player-viewable scribbling at the beginning of the session, which helped, but sort of backslid to purely verbal descriptions as time went on.  This might be a good lever to use for conscious pacing control.