Phaedra - Session 20

We're jumping right along to session 20! This is the main game I am running. This is not session 20 with this crew (more like 10 probably?), there's one other main group who plays a lot less and then a few different one-shot-ish games that have taken place.

I wrote about the first session here of this campaign here and hopefully I'll eventually write up the other 18 of them, but I am tired of waiting to catch up and am just going to start writing these as they happen. I'll try to lay out the premise of what's going on. 

This group finished the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford a few months ago and are setting off on their new adventure (hex-crawling their way to the Singing Stones from Wyvern's Song). We played through a few months of downtime where lots of big changes happened for the characters and they were able to spend a wagon-load of money.

The party, consisting of:

Freda, the level 4 cleric, Curate of the Church of Hekate and agent of the Northern Covenant 

Zelena, level 2 necromancer and her two Dolmenwood-bred hounds, Chaos and Mortimer (this player was not present)

Cassian, level 3 bard, accidental spy and wielder of an infamous pirate's blade

Winchester, level 3 magic-user and king of the Brandonsford Goblins (and currently transformed into a humanoid boar-like creature)

and their caravan of hirelings (an eclectic group of halflings, dwarves, and a few classed humans), their 10 hired guards, plus a wagon for their future treasure set off towards the southwest of the great dwarven keep of Ther Khuldir towards the Mountains of Chaos, where they hope to find Price Hessian, the adopted son of the Queen of the Dwarves and return him for the 10k gold bounty. 

The third (and mostly final!) iteration of my map. God I love hexkit, this turned out soooooooo pretty, I can't stand it.

This is the first time I've run any sort of hex-crawl. I stocked the hexes and built my encounter tables for regions using ktrey's stocking method (I like dense hexes), the specific overloaded encounter die from this Seed of Worlds post and using rules from Meandering Banter that is referred to in said post. I haven't stocked too many hexes yet so I am glad this session went how it did. All the work I did in creating this first region really paid off.

They started their crawl by performing some subterfuge at a local noble's estate (a key member in the old aristocracy that lost power when the great Empire was pushed out of the region 50 years ago), trying to suss out his loyalties and see if he had any information on Price Hessian's where-abouts. The noble gave them lots of into (a 12 on a reaction check) and informed the group of another party searching for the prince.

The first region in their journey is the Feastlands, settled but dangerous farmland that snakes around the northern part of the territory that the party's related faction, The Northern Covenant (a unified force of local halflings, dwarves, witches, and Hekate worshipers) are based out of. 

The caravan headed west across the great road, where they ran into two giant horned sheep wandering southwards. Cassian was able to recall his monster lore (using the Dolmenwood bard ability) and figure out that these were probably lost from a cyclops village in the mountains to the north. 

 Curious, they followed the tracks (thanks for the hunter hireling they gained recently) north, and guided the sheep to follow them. After a few hours of tracking, they came across a seemingly-abandoned farm field, which was strange since this was harvesting season (although I have a calendar with harvesting-related info on it, I haven't shared it with them yet so I just told them this was suspicious. This whole encounter happened because they rolled and got a boon/found a secret on the hazard die so I tried to make this obvious to them). They approached the farmhouse at the center and were greeted by a human farmwife.

One of their guards yelled out as two sets of five farmhands descended upon them from the south, most with bows but a few with finely made steel swords. A clash ensued, the bulk of the hirelings and guards fought a pitched battle against the farmhands. A well-timed fog spell from Hekate hid the caravan from view and hid the guards as they mercilessly took down the armed farm workers.

At the main house, the farm wife attacked Cassian with a knife as the remainder of her "family" began to arm themselves inside. One of the "sons" poured poison onto a blade. The party moved quickly, striking down the wife and charging inside. Cassian charged a young daughter, who was casting magic out of the side door, and struck her down (yikes, man. He is really sticking to his chaotic alignment here). An illusion faded and the young girl was revealed to be an elderly illusionist (I'm not down with killing children in my game honestly but I am not sure my group knows that. They probably would have saw through this feint immediately. There's enough children being murdered in the world right now, I don't want it in my game).

The remainder of the took down the family in quick order, taking the assassin alive. Two guards died in the initial ambush and two were on death's door, but quick healing spells brought the injured guards back to life.

After investigating the property, the party found a cache of weapons and armor (far more than could equip the dead farmhands) and intelligence (the code cracked by Cassian and his bardic skills) about current area and the names of some Imperial spies embedded in the local nobility and in the Northern Covenant. They also found a large amount of small coins in chests hidden away, plus a few potions.

The party abandoned the sheep and headed back to the keep, presenting their new found info to the Triumvirate, the leaders of the Northern Covenant, who had recently been falling apart internally.

Using the city-crawing hazard dice from that same Meandering Banter post, during the previous session I had rolled a faction conflict and happen to roll the Dwarves, Halfllings, and Church of Hekate. The party wasn't positive what led to it, but they witnessed a public confrontation between the leaders of each faction, who together make up the controlling force of the region. Unless the party was to do something drastic, this was going to have massive effects on any future incursions on the region from outside forces. Luckily, the well-timed delivery from the party may have saved the region from doom.

The party was asked to donate the arms and armor they recovered and sold the illusionist's spellbook. 

With a little more money in their pockets and their home region in more stable condition, the party visited a traveling fortune-teller (who only had doom tiding to give to everyone) and they went on their way back to the Singing Stones.

Just as they got out of the mountains again, their path was blocked by a huge boulder. Two huge figures, sun reflecting off their strange iridescent scaled armor and giant tusked helmets, called out and said they would move the boulder for 500 gold. The party replied and said they could come down and get it, so one figure began to make his down the side of the pass. Freda took this chance to instill the fear of her goddess in the one who remained up top, who was able to resist the spell. He yelled to kill them all, and grabbed a huge boulder from his side and prepared to throw it down.

And that is where we finished for the night!

Random notes:

- I only had rough notes on the secret imperial base they stumbled upon but it was too perfect not to let them stumble upon. Luckily I did have the notes of the size of the force stationed their, but no stats or anything. They also all were much less armored then they would have been if they were prepared, which was part of the fun (they were startled by the approach of an official looking caravan of their enemies on their doorstep) 

- This fight revealed to me that I have played enough old school games recently that I can just deal if I don't have the stats for a basic creature. I grab some random human stat blocks quickly and made up the rest and it was fine. I know what damages of different weapons are, what thac0's low level characters tend to have, and I generated the illusionist quick.

My quick battle map and other notes from this session

- What a fun fight! That was the first time they've had a huge force come after them. They also just wiped the floor with them too. They had much better armor and the guards rolled wild hits. 

- The cleric can cast fog due to her custom spell list, which I'll talk about sometime.

- I did have to just sort of make shit up about where people were and how far they could go. It made me want to pull out Owlbear Rodeo. In the moment I really was missing it, but thinking about how it went, it honestly didn't go too bad the way it was. Managing combat with this amount of characters is new to me though, it's a lot to keep track of.

- splitting xp and gold between pcs and hirelings with different shares (some with 1/2 and some 1/3) is my nightmare and I hate it. I need an excel document for this

I think that's it? Two long session reports in two days is enough for me for awhile. Happy playing!

Shattered Coast Report - The Miners of Redhorn

*A report submitted to Bastion's branch of the Thug's Guild*

Job: Independent Op

Submitting Goon: Frankie (no last name)

Nickname: Little

I responded to a request for support from a mine owner named Ned Holly. He had requested help getting his miners to go back to work since they had been getting "superstitious" recently and productivity was going down. Probably just gotta crack some heads, should have been a simple job. It kinda was, in some ways.

I set out with Xi, a handsome lady who said she’s a Chinese Princess (she looks it, if you know what I mean) and a “conceptual engineer” named Monica, who seemed all business.

We made it to the mine. It's up in this weird place I don't really get (everyone tried to explain it but it went over my head) but I guess stuff here vanished and different stuff comes back. A tough place to make a living, for sure.

We met up with Ned who gave us the lowdown. I still don't really get it, but some bodies were showing up while they were mining, but they were the bodies of people who were working in the camp. They were doubles or something, I don't know. We heard a warning call go out while he was talking and Xi rushed out to see what was happening.

We followed Xi to a newly uncovered body, and it was the corpse of Monica, who was alive beside us.

We did some more digging (heh) around. We talked to the fire elementals who were helping with the job. They didn't like their boss much but they loved blowing up one of my tallboys. Good lads. They couldn't talk like regular people but they tried to show us with their hands what had been happening. I didn't really get it, but Monica and Xi seemed to.

We talked with a few other people, a manager among the miners named Olive. She explained some stuff to us after we paid for her food. She had another miner, Eggy, get some supplies ready for us in case we went down into the mining tunnels.

We went over to a shrine from the priest who used to live here, and I gave it one of my favorite "once overs". We found a journal with some missing pages, and we pegged ol' Ned as the one who was keeping secrets from us (those Fire guys really seemed to think he was behind everything).

My mates distracted Ned while I entered his cabin and started tearing apart the place. I was only a few minutes in when he came in to see what was happening. I shoved the missing diary pages in his face and he told us they were reports from the priest addressed to him. He didn't steal nothing. I apologized to him, I gave him a beer and Monica fixed his broken drawer and we went on our business.

Next Monica went and investigated the bodies. We recognized one as Eggy and one as Ned Holly. Monica kinda sat and poked at one for awhile (it looked just like that bloke Eggy). She did.......something (She said she "extracted" "circularity" from it, whatever that means.) When we went back to talk to Olive, she was surprised we knew who Eggy was, as he had died a week and a half ago from a cave-in.

I don't fully remember what we did next. We talked for awhile (Well, Monica talked. I listened.) We talked to the fire elementals a few more time. I gave them one of my last remaining cigarettes from the old world. Those were good dudes. I held up my lantern at one and he gave me a little buddy, a little mini-it. A good boy.

Monica came up with a plan to fix all of this and still get paid. She taught the lantern to count using candles, and told Xi and I to rob poor Ned when the timer was just about over. I ended up ambushing Ned using a smoke grenade and something Monica gave me to help see through it and tied him up using Xi's crazy hair (I couldn't break it, strongest rope I've ever seen. Gotta ask her for more sometime). He started throwing fire at me but I held him down. Xi extracted the chest from his room. I didn't see what happened but the whole cabin started on fire. Monica was doing her "extracting" business on the double of Ned this whole time. The lantern was timed to go off when she was done with her business. Right when it was about to happen, I sprinted away from him like Monica told me to.

Ned vanished, and the mine was suddenly empty. There was nothing there but a run down camp. Looked like it hadn't been touched for weeks.

We used his keys to get our pay from the bank back in Bastion. We walked out of there with a pretty penny. I got paid. I don't know if we really did what we said we were gonna do, but what's why you gotta go with the guild for operations like this. We got insurance against beating up the boss and taking your pay right from him, you know?

- LF

————

My first adventure after my return to the Shattered Coast GLOG server, which is an open-table and kind of wild mix of whatever people want to run or play, all within a simple ruleset. 

I played my new character, Little Frankie, a Thug (imagine a rando baddie in a bond movie who gets hit in the face a lot, who's now stuck in a slightly gonzo fantasy realm, which conveniently has a Thug's guild branch. That's Frankie)

I had a blast (although I played in an adventure earlier in the day and doing two a day is a recipe for a migraine or me).

This was such a neat adventure. I had been talking with Vivanter about playing more low-combat scenarios, since most adventures run in the server the tend to be pretty combat heavy, and this was exactly what I wanted.

The premise felt like a Junji Ito story. I really dug it, and I really dug our ‘solution’. It's maybe not clear from my rundown exactly what happened, and I definitely left out details. We definitely didn't understand the full story by the end, but we knew enough. I'm happy with the mystery being preserved. The details of exactly how it went down should die with us. It just feels right that way.

What I didn’t like about it more have to do with the rule-set than the adventure. I don’t having DC type checks in what is supposed to be an OSR-type game. Common ability checks are 10 on a d20+ability modifier. I haven’t checked the math but it seems harder to pass a test with this math (given your stats end up not mattering that much) than with a under-ability-score roll ala B/X. It’s also one of the main tools in the game, so it gets used a lot.

Notably I really don’t like charisma checks. I think it’s not great to depend on a player’s ability to hold a functioning conversation or to be convincing irl and that be the only way you ‘check’ their ability to be charismatic, but also I don’t think they should so random if you roll them. I really like reaction rolls, that 2d6 is just such a nice curve, and most of the time they don’t hate you. Rolling snake eyes is a special case.

Besides that though, the adventure was great. We shared tools and strategies, really had to depend on our wits to figure out what was going on, and seemingly really had a good way to completely delete our characters from existence (if we were to have gone down the mining tunnels, we probably wouldn't have made it back. Existence seemed fucky in there), which what more can you ask for?

Other little things:

- using the smoke grenade and ampule from Monica and the hair cuffs from Xi along with Frankie’s ‘Tying them up’ skill was executed flawlessly and I think it’s the sign of a good gm when you are allowed to have your well-planned plans execute smoothly. Ned stood no chance. 

- Loved the fire elementals. I ended up giving the lantern to Xi, which is now a magic item in itself, because the upkeep seemed to expensive for a brand new character on the block. 

- The conceptual engineer class seems awesome and incredibly difficult to gm for and Vivanter didn’t seem to blink when it came to us re-writing timelines using it. 

- Loving the Thug class obviously. It’s so much fun to play. I was originally going to do this other class from the same post but Thug really spoke to me. My goal was to find a glog class that would be effective for investigation-type missions (or hexcrawls, if I could find one) and the Thug fits that great. I’ll probably avoid the exotic weapon proficiency. I already have a character on the server who exists just to kick ass, I don’t need a second. 

- My two thug abilities are: 

✧ Your training has given you a distinctive way of moving. If you choose, shopkeepers, street urchins and other minor NPCs immediately recognize you as someone who could beat them up. Morale rolls are made with a penalty equal to the difference between your level and the NPC's HD (minimum -0).

✧ When you take ten minutes to search a room, you can choose to search it very thoroughly (heh heh). This is a loud process and will alert anyone else in the building or cause an immediate wandering monster encounter. At the end of this thorough search, you will have discovered every secret door, revealed every trap, and piled up anything even vaguely saleable in a heap on the floor. 

 

Thanks for reading! <3

Quick Thoughts: Black March #1

(I told someone I would review their zine (not this one) and that one is really long so I am procrastinating by reading other zines)

I picked up Black March #1 today by Castle Grief.

I don't know much about Castle Grief (that's what I've seen them go by, so I will refer to them as such unless corrected), minus that they make really neat physical-media based zines (type-writers, pens, cutting up pieces of paper) and selling them digitally and really like dark fantasy shit. Also they have a substack. 

They posted a few pieces of art in the rainbow OSR discord, and that made me really want to see what they had made. Something about actually putting something down on paper really makes me wet. All of my campaign notes are situated in obsidian, which I like for convenience purposes, but there's something about shacking up with a stack of papers and pens that really gets me off. I don't know why this is coming off as sexual but it's not untrue. 

I'm not that into MÖRK BORG. The game and book really excited me when I got into OSR stuff a year-ish ago (I showed a few people the book because I loved the art so much, and that was weird to me) and not to sound like one of those reactionary fash-y OSR people, but the art and difficulty to read doesn't really excite me anymore. I also don't really know how I would run it, or who I would run it with. I don't always want to play is ultra-dark, almost-apocalyptic settings.

I mention this tangent because the ruleset referenced in the zine, Black Steel Bastards, is a hack of MÖRK BORG. Knowing this information does not at all affect what one could get out of the zine, I am just mentioning it.

Okay, now for my random thoughts on the zine:

- I really like that the area covered in the zine has a connecting hazard: The Black Blight, the fungus plauge that is a problem for anyone in the region. Most of the keys in the hex reference it or just fugus in some way. Fungus is just a general connecting theme as well, from the cover to the goblins that cultivate it (which is what the goblins in my game do too!).

- I really like that there are multiple different goblins tribes in play. It doesn't seem like there's a huge difference between them, based on my quick read. Their names are also really similar and hard to distinguish for my dsylexia-addled brain. I also like that they aren't silly little local creatures. They are deadly, have their own ways of dealing with things that makes them smart and tactical, and have lots of intelligence that players would love to know (their pharmaceutical knowledge, for instance).

- Did I mention how much I loved the hex map? I think the scale is a little silly, I just think 1 landmark in a 5-mile hex is silly for how large 5 miles is (this is likely just a very personal preference) but besides that, there's so much to steal here. The best compliment I can give the hexmap and key is that it gaves me a ton of thoughts on how I want to spruce up the hexmap I am writing. There is so much here that is connected. It's not overhwleming, it's not like every key relates every other one, but you know. I'm going to skip listing examples because you can just buy the zine but it's really good at seeding ideas throughout the map. 

- Maybe the most important one is having the not-yet-identified antidote being a key on the map. That makes sense, right? Aren't cures for things often located their the related poisons and such? 

- "HEXKEY: Steal, alter, & destroy!" Boy will I!

- The descriptions in the key were also really evocative. I sort of queston sometimes why I would need the prose of a key or a dungeon to be written 'well' when it's going to be translated through me to my players but I kind of get it now.

- I think I also just really like reading materials that come from the sweat of a home camapaign. You can tell someone put love into this, and that's neat as hell.

- I glanced at the dungeon at the end, the key seems good and terse and the map very cool looking (it's a side profile, very chill) but I didn't read it yet.

- A little thing: Weapons and items drawn in the cool art also get simple magic item write-ups. I don't know if that's a MÖRK BORG-ism but it's cool as hell.

 

Look, this zine made me want to get out my pens and draw something. Write up a hex on a piece of paper instead of inside my data dungeon. And it gave me a lot of ideas and concepts I want to steal. Pretty much the best compliment I can give.

I'm really looking forward to reading Tarvannion next.

Thanks for reading!

Dad ADND One-Shot: Quick Impressions

 I finished an ADND 1e one-shot (well, the first session) I ran for my dad's birthday. Afterwards, I immediately ordered a large meal and downed a sprite. A long session will do that to you.

I had originally planned on re-introducing ADND to my dad with a short campaign that we would play every month or so. Something lighter but after I had done my required reading and sat and ingested the information for awhile.

That didn't happen, as it goes, and he asked if we could play for his birthday. My younger brother organized the group and I finished reading the books, got character sheets put together, went through Blue Bard's adnd combat blog posts a few mores times, and we went for it.

I ran U1 (The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh). I had initially wanted to run that as the start of a campaign, because I really really liked it after reading it originally. The first half seemed like a great length for a one-shot though. I've played in a few OSR-y one-shots recently and I've learned that you really want to run much less than you think you can get through. If you think it will take a few hours, it will take five. 

My older brother also asked to skip the character creation because that takes too much time, and I was already thinking that same thing. I used the automated character sheets from the Blue Bard + the pregens from the last page of the module (plus their recommended magic items because why not, it's a one-shot) to make characters. I also used a write up of the equipment packages from a different module to give them equipment. Writing up the 7 characters (5 PCs, 2 NPCs) went much faster than I thought it would honestly.

We spent the first hour chatting and then I ran over the basics of the character sheets. I had no intention of teaching the whole game nor did I expect them to read the books beforehand. The books are too difficult to absorb without context. If I were playing a campaign, it would be different and I would want them to study up on their own. I don't think I would ever play a 1E campaign where I was expected to be the source of all information, it's just too obtuse of a system.

My older brother arrived after the explanation and then we started! I summarized the town bit, and played it out how the adventure expects it, and then put them in front of the haunted mansion.

I'm not going to do an in-depth summary of play, and the rest of this is going to be very spoiler-y and also have expected to have read or played to module. 

Also my players shouldn't read the rest of this because we did decide to run the last half of the module at the later date.

Also I am tired, this will be brief:

- They never ran into the assassin! I wasn't sure whether to quantum-ogre him out of existence or what. I was looking for to dealing with that. Maybe I should have had him yell or something, but they weren't very interested in the upper level of the mansion. They were laser-focused on the basement from the first second. They did find his clothes though and tore them up making sure they weren't trapped or something

- They really blundered around in the basement/wine cellar, so I had the bandits all get ready to ambush them. It was several hours of in-game time between them getting freaked out by the rot grubs in the corpse in the wine cellar --

 (side note: Is a paladin affected by rot grubs? It felt weird to have them be affected by it since you can use cure disease but also have them immune to disease. Rot grubs are weird and hard to run properly anyway. How many of the 7 come out of the corpse? Why have something that just murders someone with no context? How are they supposed to know to use fire on them???)

-- and according to the notes for the other room, the lookout is supposed to hear them if they blunder around the wine cellar, so I had the bandits set up an ambush for them. If it was several hours wait, maybe they should have just left? God that would have been a lame ending. 

- I didn't know how to deal with them deciding that every member would look for secret doors in some rooms. We could have played it slowly but I just rolled 4 d6s every time and both times a 1 was rolled, so I gave it to them with a hefty time penalty (30 min each time I think). It gave the bandits lots of time to organize an ambush, so it wasn't helpful for them in the long run.

- Having the paladin constantly detecting evil behind every door was interesting. It really sold the fake haunted house bit quickly, when there constantly was no evil anywhere.

- They just ruined the bandit ambush. Those poor bandits were not prepared for a mostly in-perfect condition group. If we weren't playing a one-shot, they would have likely been on more equal-footing. The local PC (Alexandra L'Whore, named after a legendary drag performer from Denver) magic-user also got their sleep spell off and made the 8 smugglers fall asleep. The leader illusionist wasn't able to get their spell off but it would have been very dramatic if they did, probably would have change the tide of the fight. Plus none of the bandits had ranged weapons, so they couldn't interrupt the sleep spell. Actually, I should have had them throw their daggers probably. 

- I used the combat rules from the Blue Bard and it was still weird. So much to remember. I think I forgot one or more rules in every fight, especially the tied initiative. Forgot all about weapon speeds and all that. No one realized of course, and I did push the fights to do quickly, particularly since we didn't have infinite time.

 

Oof, I'll probably talk about this more (and actually link links!)(DONE) and I wanted to talk about my impressions of Adnd when I have had more time to think, but the impending headache is telling me I should stop writing.

 Take care!