Arden Vul - Session 2

The party

Skeggi Arnbjorgsson, the Elf Thief
Basil Cydones, Archontean Magic-User, member of the Order of Thoth
Lucius Virillius the Archontean Lyan, Hand of the Emperor
Freydis, the Wiskin Cleric of Thor (hireling)

Summary

The date: 2993 AEP, also known as the 8th year of Constans XXV. 1st day of Fourth-month.

We return to our party hunched together at the top of a boulder with a hidden campsite at its peak. They decided to follow Bellringer, the leader of the 3 goblins they encountered last session, to the Arena, deeper inside the dungeon.

Bellringer led them east, to the room where they encountered the rock lizards earlier. The lizards seemed to be sleeping or absent, and the party looted a few treasures from the room (2 silver ingots, a lizard head broken off of a sculpture, an ethereal-looking potion, and a single magical boot of Elven make).

They followed the cave north and after a small turn, discovered an exit that led into a underground mushroom forest. They climbed down the 20 foot wall that their exit led to (and Skeggi used his thief skills to secure the rope and climb down himself).

Bellringer confidently led the party through the mushroom forest to the edge of a large lake (by falling in). They were able to retrieve him and he led the party to a small trail with a dock at the end of it, with a few boats.

The party and the goblins got in one boat and rowed to a center island, protected by two giant crabs. Daunted, they left and found the cave entrance Bellringer and crew traveled from initially, which was 10 feet above the lake. Luckily, Skeggi's thief skills again came in handy as he climbed and attached a rope to a giant crystal coming out of the cave.

The party and goblins each made their way into the cramped cave, which was full of large, soft crystal pillars that criss-crossed the cavern. They heard an omious warning from deeper inside and the goblins recommended they rush through and run away from the guardians of the cave. They did so and the crystal beings inside did not chase them.

The party traveled through a few damp caves. Basil braved going through a small exit from one that was lit with a mysterious blue light and found himself an enchanted staff that shone with blue light in a large radius.

Bellringer led them to another guarded cave, where a ground of mushroom people gathered in quiet contemplation. The party and goblins excused themselves and walked around the perimeter of the room. The mushroom folk acknowledged their presence but did not intervene.

Bellringer, excited to be past the danger, led them through a few empty old Archontean chambers to a stairwell that would take them down to the arena.

On the way down, the party passed a group of Trolls dragging a captured monster behind them.

Down more stairs, over a rickety bridge above a chasm, and into a huge hallway, made of black, polished stone, built with proportions unusual for Archonteans, the party and their guides arrived outside of the Arena. They were greeted by another Troll, this one running a ramshackle bar at a busy crossroads. The bartender informed them of an impeding spectacle and answered many of their questions about the area.

Bellringer offered to give a tour of the Arena to the party and the other two goblins rushed off.

My take

Yay second session! We ended an hour early for a few different reasons (I ran out of prep for one).

This one was kind of a bitch to prep for. The goblins come from an explicit room (where all their history and offer to help the party came from). There was a bit of info about where the goblins ended up but I decided to reconstruct their journey and figure out exactly which rooms they went to and how they could have possibly ended up where they did.

The difficulty came from their being many many paths that they could have taken. I ended up decided on one that seemed the least dangerous for a party of 20 goblins and assumed they did some scouting/had some general knowledge of the area and were able to get around the aggressive elements of this section of the dungeon.

The party also rolled no encounter rolls which certainly helped things.

This had the effect of making this journey go far quicker than I was prepared for. Maybe I should have had Bellringer know less information? Regardless, it was a fun session, and the party is in way deeper than I thought they would be at this point. They have a lot of avenues to explore from here, they've already been informed that a few of the more 'civilized' areas are close to the Arena, but they may go back up to the floor they were on and explore.

One of the complexities of Arden Vul is what culture created each room is important for making sense of the place, but that information is not usually detailed in the room descriptions (or sometimes it is and I just miss it). I described the Arena hallway as 'Archontean' which is not necessarily true. The session report above is a little more accurate.

I am realizing as I prep for the next session that Arden Vul will not hold all the answers for me, as much as I want it too. Just like any pre-existing adventure, I'll need to build off what is there to flesh out my own game, and just accept that there may be something written that contradicts something that I make up.

I'm also thinking about implementing an xp bonus (100 * character level) for good class-y adventuring. When a thief does good thieving, when a magic-user casts a well-timed spell, etc. I'm not sure about the frequency of when to give it out quite yet, but I am thinking about giving the first one to Skeggi for this session for climbing walls real good.

The idea for the xp bonus comes from some bullshit that Gygax said he did for ADND, and I like the idea. I don't want the game to take years and years and increasing the xp gain a bit will help with that, and it's fun to encourage people to play their class.

An important question: Does Lucius' incredible combat skills from the last session count as a paladin-related activity? I'm not sure it does. I think the Lyan will get one when he starts getting judgey or makes rash decisions based on smiting chaos.

That's it for this session, take care!

Arden Vul - Session 1

Welcome to the first session report! I'm going to try to keep these pretty basic and hopefully will not spoil my players too much, if they want to read them too. 

The party

Skeggi Arnbjorgsson, the Elf Thief
Basil Cydones, Archontean Magic-User, member of the Order of Thoth
Lucius Virillius the Archontean Lyan, Hand of the Emperor
Freydis, the Wiskin Cleric of Thor (hireling, played by my dad for this session)

(Archonteans and Wiskins and both human cultures in the world of Arden Vul)

Summary

The date: 2993 AEP, also known as the 8th year of Constans XXV. 1st day of Fourth-month.

Among other rumors, the party had heard the Pyramid of Thoth and a particular basement of a building in the ruined city above were good starting points for fresh-faced newcomers.

The party arrived at the base of the cliffs underneath the great city of Arden Vul. The imperial road took them to the base of the cliffs, with the ruins of Arden Vul 1500 feet above them. They could make out a series of switchbacks that climbed up the cliff, in-between two huge statues of Arden and Vul, the legendary adventurers. A massive waterfall made communication difficult and made the surrounding area slick.

The party searched around the base of the cliff to find secret entrances but didn't find any.

They declined to search the tower at the base and started up the switchback. At the first switchback, Lucius and Basil lost their footing and slipped at a broken flagstone. Freydis and Skeggi luckily were able to grab them both in time.

The party decided that using rope to tie themselves together was the better option, so they did so and Lucius took the lead and pounded iron spikes into the walls, slowing down their pace but helping keep everyone safe.

Around the third switchback, a piece of masonry from the city above fell and knocked the party off balance. Luckily, the rope and iron spikes kept the party from falling.

Between the 3rd and 4th switchback, Skeggi's keen Elven senses led him to notice a secret door on the path. The door opened easily and the party headed inside.

Entering the Dungeon

The door opened up to a cave system. The first room was covered in detritus and refuse from common use, and the floor was covered in obvious footprints, although they were smaller than human sized.

From there, they ventured into the cave system and got into marching order. They came across two decomposing bodies, both a few months old. Both were humanoids, a few feet shorter than human, with dog-like faces and fur and imperial armor that looked to be a few hundred years out of fashion. They found no loot and carried on.

After searching through more passages, they found a bust of a human face (typical of an ancient Philosopher figure) with empty eye sockets built into a small alcove. Skeggi found no traps but did find mechanisms that suggested something was meant to be placed in the eyes.

After leaving the room, the party heard a strange cacophony approaching them. Suddenly, a group of 8 albino monkeys appeared in a turn beyond them and pelted them with shit and fruit and began sprinting away. The party stopped mapping the rooms and began persuing them, curious where they came from.

They passed by a large Archontean chamber with a big door, a large boulder, and chased the monkeys up a long slope and another turn. The monkeys bounded through a small cave with several large rock-like lizards. They dropped meat and sprinted through, leaving the party unable to keep chasing them.

The party headed back the way they came, but at the edge of their torch light were 3 large segmented worms with multiple horrific mouths, heading towards them. Possibly attracted by the noise of the chase?

The party backed themselves into a small crevice, just beyond the doorway to the rock lizards. Lucius kept himself in front (and exposed to the rock lizards to the side.)

Two of the worms rushed forward as Lucius cleaved one through the armored head with his mighty thews and greatsword. Other parties members threw darts to no avail.

The other worm attempted to bite the Lyan and paralyze him. Although he was struck five times, the might of his god kept him safe.

The third worm crawled over the walls and targeted Skeggi. The party was able to slay it before it did any harm. The remaining worm attacked Lucius again, who kept standing after many bites and was now immune to the worm's venom.

The remaining worm was attacked by one of the rock lizards and finished off by Lucius.

The party ran off with one corpse and extracted a use of paralytic venom from its glands. The rock lizards took the second corpse for themselves and were sufficiently distracted.

The party headed back the way they came and encountered three lost goblins who were trapped by the Beastmen (and had plenty of bad things to say about them). The goblins asked for assistance getting back the Arena where they had came from originally in exchange for leading the way. The party accepted.

Basil asked the goblins about a particular mushroom they had heard about (and did not share that they heard the Beastmen were looking for it) and the goblin leader pointed them to a large boulder they had passed during their Monkey chase. Basil was able to use Spider Climb to check the top of the boulder and found a small campsite and a few large mushrooms, not what he was looking for but took one to examine later. 

My take

The entry into Halls itself was a surprise, I forgot that door was there and I didn't prep those rooms beforehand. The game said anyone had a 1-in-8 chance to notice the door. Wasn't sure if that was while active searching or passing by. I started rolling dice for each party member and got a 1 immediately, so I just decided that roll was for the Elf and off we went.

I'm honestly not sure how fast the monkeys were supposed to be, given they didn't have any stats. I was running this whole section blind so I didn't even know where they came from. I was relieved when they escaped, although the chase was fun though so I was happy with it.

I thought the fight was a blast. I heard from one player that they were a little confused why things were happening the way they were, but I was okay with that. this was my second Adnd comabt using Huso's amended rules and I like it quite a bit. I intentionally made the combat a bit opaque since I wasn't used to the rules yet and needed to make some decisions on the fly.

What was tough was not being able to find the monster stats immediately. Arden Vul used a slightly different name for the beast in the monster manual during the combat, which I didn't have printed and just had on my phone. Arden Vul usually included a tiny stat block which was helpful but didn't mention that they could crawl on walls. Also do monsters in ADND not have morale? I need to re-read the monster manual. I arbitrarily decided on a Morale for them when things got dangerous (and just used morale from B/X on a 2d6 since that is what I am used to) and it worked fine in the moment)

By the time we hit combat, I had like 4 binders and many pieces of paper I was referencing (as well as the monster manual on my phone) and that was beyond the upper limit of how much my brain can handle. I'm not sure how to fix this for the future. A big one will be getting the next couple levels of the dungeon printed, or just finally giving up and buying the books.

Again, since I get migraines I prefer to use as much physical media as possible when running games, but I'm not particularly skilled at doing so yet. My notes were a mess after the session.

I think I ran everything fine, I ended up doing a lot of reading room descriptions out-loud instead of absorbing it and re-telling it in my words. There was a lot of information I was juggling and I'm looking forward to it become easier and more rules becoming second-nature.

Lucius is a ridiculous character, his massive strength (18/75 I think) plus a great sword meant he was wiping out 3 HD enemies with a single hit. A ton of fun, but the party is in a lot of trouble if he eats it. He definitely took the spotlight in combat, and I imagine that will be the case for now since he is a lot beefier than his companions.

I think everyone got a moment in the spotlight eventually. I'm sure Basil and Skeggi will get more as time goes on and as their class abilities improve.

It was fun having my dad there for an adventure! He got along well with everyone and was happy to be included.

The players decided to map and I wasn't particularly looking forward to it. This initial section doesn't line up on a grid and it was difficult to communicate. I'm going to shift to describing just the current room and not what it connects to, even if they can see it (the chambers in the cave were quite small so the torchlight usually lit up where they were and the rooms connected to it).

Most importantly, myself and everyone seemed to have fun and are excited to play more! We'll be playing weekly so expect to see a lot more of these!

My Arden Vul Campaign - Resources

I am running a campaign set in the Halls of Arden Vul using ADND 1e mostly by the book (using Anthony Huso's interpretations for most things)

You will see session summaries eventually!

I wanted to put together all the different resources I am using for the game. So here you go!

Resources

Original Books

    PHB, DMG, Unearthed Arcana, the various Monster Manuals, this full price list someone made

I originally told my players to read OSRIC instead of the original books but there are too many changes. 

For Unearthed Arcana, I'm pulling out bits that seem fun and discarding the rest. I haven't brought in the changes to level caps or extra races. I am using all the spells because why not. I'm not using the Cavalier class, mostly just because Huso doesn't use it and I am using his automated character sheets.

The game is still somewhat in flux still. It'll keep developing as we play. 

Someone also made a full price list in google sheets, but I forgot to write down the blog post. Thanks random blogger!

Huso's resources

    Blog (and this unofficial compilation pdf), playables, paladin supplement

His blog is really the only reason I got interested in running 1e. I didn't make any changes to the character sheet, we're just using what's there. I might need to make some alternations eventually but it's fine for now. I think it's meant to be printed out which is hilarious to me.

We're also using his new Plurisy of Paladins supplement, based on some classes from Dragon. Its really absurd and extra and I like it a lot. One player is playing a Lyan (LN paladin, the judge) as an arm of the empire and it's going to be a lot of fun.

Halls of Arden Vul

    The pdfs, the maps, the facebook group.

We're using the default setting with a few minor changes, with more to come as time goes on likely. I could just seek out the creator on facebook for every question, but I'd rather just make it my game. 

There's a lot of random maps and images people have made for use from the facebook group that I have grabbed, plus it fun to see random bits of info from the creator.

Personally, I am slowly printed out the books and putting them in binders. I get migraines when looking at screens for too long so I rely on analog for running games (even though I do run games online).

Dragonsfoot

    Gygax's opinions, Footprints zines

I've also been reading a lot of Gygax's opinions, which you can find plenty of on Dragonsfoot. Boy, what a piece of shit. He truly hates women. I do love using systems that he didn't use, like psionics and attack adjustment per AC. It's really enlightening to read more of his words because it becomes more and more clear that any published rpg is: 1. One brief instance of rules that are ever-changing and. 2. Made up of a lot of people's opinions, it's never just one auteur.

I read through a bunch of the Footprints zine. It was fun and I'm going to pull a few things from it. Really, I was on the look for an expanded equipment list since ADND seems focused on magic items and weapons and less on miscellaneous items. I might end up pulling in BFRPG's big equipment supplement.

That's all I am using for now. Next up should be the report from our first session, which was a ton of fun and went entirely in a way I didn't expect. Take care!

Campaign Updates

Hello! It’s been awhile, I thought I would give updates on all my various campaigns.

Arden Vul

I’m starting an Arden Vul Adnd 1e campaign.

my short-lived zine idea cover

I finally am free from the burnout I felt after cramming 1e into my head to run a game for my dad’s birthday earlier in the year. I am now actually excited about running it again.

All my prep is done for the first session. We’re going to sit down and make characters together soon, since we have to all learn how to use thebluebard’s helpful but confusing automated character sheets.

We’re going to be running it pretty much by the book plus all of the blue bard’s input and changes. 

We’ll see how it goes! I’m hoping to be able to write session reports for it like Vivanter has been for his micro-campaigns. 

Phaedra

My main campaign is on hiatus. Two of the players weren’t able to commit any time recently and I really need a break from it. 

I loved running it since it’s mostly my siblings and it’s been great to see them regularly but god the scope of the campaign is too big. I added faction turns and complex relationship maps and a big hex crawl and it was too much. They do like the political stuff but I don’t know how much they loved the hex crawl. It made their last big adventure feel big but was it worth the hours and hours I spent writing it? Probably not. 

The last thing we did was a big non-lethal tournament and that was fun. It wasn’t perfect (I think the rules were too convoluted) but it was fun and I gave out a bunch of loot. We also stopped the campaign with the characters feeling like they are now major players with their faction, which is a fun place to be in.

I felt great relief at being done for now. I’m not sure what picking it back up in the future will look like. 

Shattered Horizons

Shattered Horizons is the big group open-table discord server shepherded by Hilander. It’s a reboot of Shattered Coast which eventually people lost interest in. 

It’s been fun, most gms (but not all) made hex crawls. I started a big dungeon. It’s the first dungeon I’ve made myself in a long time, definitely my first ‘OSR’ dungeon.

The dungeon is the Tower, an impossibly large tower that floated down from the heavens a few months ago in game time. I also wrote the Forest region that the Tower landed in. The Forest was pretty simple to write and it’s been used in games I’ve played in by Vivanter to great success. 

Also I created my favorite monster the Long Rat (it’s like a Giant Rat but it’s Long instead) for the dungeon and I love them. There’s now a breeding pair in the home village. 

My goal for The Tower was to make a big, interconnected dungeon one small area (8-10 rooms) at a time. All the areas I’ve worked on are all on level 1, which is connected by an underground river. There’s 3 completed areas right now (the Tainted Settlement, the Lower Catacombs, and the Goblin Warren). I’ve got a few more areas I want to complete before moving on to level 2.

I’m trying to use a few sources for each area to make mapping and stocking easy. I’m using the monster overhaul for creature and area ideas, plus a map or two. I used a dyson logos map for the Lower Catacombs and the Tome of Adventuring Design for the Goblin Warren and the next area (the Water Treatment Plant).

I’ve found with the Goblin Warren that I *love* drawing my own maps and will probably be doing that more. I can fit in a lot of detail in the maps that make running it a lot easier. It’s been much easier to describe rooms from a mix of my drawings and secondary text than text alone. I can also do things like draw a goblin-scale accurate trapeze that I would struggle to render with words.

Making the dungeon has been something I’ve been trying to work on a little bit everyday. I really don’t know if this pace works for me though, It’s something I’ve started dreading and avoiding in the last week. 

I’ve ran 3 sessions in the dungeon so far (2 with my playtest group and 1 in the actual server) and the slow pace of the games is not helping my interest.

Part of it is that I really don’t like main draw of the server, which is being able to play any ol’ glog class that’s been published on a blog. I bitch about this a lot but most classes aren’t playtested or balanced and some feel waaaay stronger than others in ways that makes my blood boil in games. Having no control on people bring to my table sucks. I dread doing combat encounters because there’s no set way people make monsters so I have no idea if what I am running is strong or weak or what. 

The general concept of the server is cool (a bunch of gms running games in a shared world) but it turns out that requires collaboration and I’m kind of a controlling bitch, you know?

Luckily I do like *playing* on the server, at least. 

Anyway, I think that’s enough bitching/reflecting for now. 

Phaedra - Session 2

Cast of Characters:

• A: Phalecia, low born cleric of Hekate (Cleric 1)
  
• Ct: Theoden, coked-out wizard (Magic-User 1)
  
• Ds: Gymothy, thief (Thief 1)

Adventure: Hole in the Oak

Rules: Old School Essentials: Basic Fantasy*

Date: 5/20/2023

*mostly

 I'm jumping back in my Phaedra session reports, back to the first session that really launched the campaign to where it is today. I started writing this months ago and just want it out the damn door already.

Play Summary

We begin near the mansion of Mattluke Kathar, local exotic meat connoisseur and general rich backwater eccentric. The party had heard Matt was hiring adventurers to descend into a dungeon nearby in Pan's Forest to collect as many types of monster meat as they could find, and they would be paid for each unique portion they brought back. The party agreed and Mattluke passed along information where they could find a down-on-his-luck fighter who was looking for work.

The party found Kargor Viperhand, layabout former duelist, passed out in a barn in a farm nearby. The party promised him a share of treasure and Kargor agreed to join them.

The four set out to the location they were given, and descended into a hole in the oak tree marked on the map. They ventured in and wandering through some rooms. They learn some secrets from some polite faces carved into the tree roots that surrounded the tunnels nearest to the entrance. 

They discovered a home-y little area nearby, and wandered in. Inside they met Ramius, a kindly goatfolk, who offered them tea. Only Gymothy accepted. After a few minutes of polite conversation in Ramius' sitting room, Gymothy dropped his tea cup and fell unconscious. Phalecia leaped toward Ramius, intending to fight him barehanded and knock him out, but was knocked-out herself.

Kargor and Theoden pulled out their weapons and Theoden managed to stab the goatfolk, killing him. Two voices cried out from inside of the goatfolk's home and Theoden cast Hold Portal, preventing the other goatfolk from entering the room. 

As Phalecia and Gymothy recovered, a giant, mutated ogre wandered past. The aura of the ogre caused several members of the party to spontaneously develop permanent skin rashes and blemishes. The ogre mentioned it would pay good money for any live halflings or gnomes it could eat, and left.

The two downed members recovered around the same time, and the group left before the Hold Portal spell duration was ended. They backtracked and explored a new section near the entrance of the dungeon. Phalecia look into a mirror near a statue of a hunger and saw the face of the hunter in the reflecting blow it's hunting horn, and the session was over.

Reflections 

Ol' Ramius saved my campaign.

 

A little hyperbolic, but I credit this devious fellow with kickstarting my campaign and giving it the energy to continue on to today. They talked about this encounter for weeks. I remember my brother A saying that he was telling his co-workers about their amazing adventure and the stress of that scene. 

 

Everything lined up to extremely tense action, and the magic-user being the one to save the day by stabbing Ramius was so fun, plus his one use of Hold Portal being the thing that saved everyone. Couldn't have planned it better.

Character creation

I remember this being a bit of a pain again. All three players this time we're new to the system and my campaign. I had some experience at this point at rolling characters but telling people what goes where was still a pain in the ass. I still don't have a better solution than having people roll their characters with dndcharacter.com, and that has its issues that I'll talk about eventually, probably.

I descrbied this process in my notes as "excruciating"

I also had the magic-user choose a spellbook from Beginning Spellbooks by Warren Denning in Knock #3, which gives 4 different options of starting spellbooks, each containing 3 level 1 spells and 1 level 2 spell, each with a thematic grouping and neat spellbook name. Theoden chose "Practical Application of Ethereal Energies", based off name/vibe alone.

The Players

Jumping back a little more, given these players eventually from one of two regualar groups as the campaign goes on, I wanted to talk a minute about them. 

I pitched this game as one-off, just try out this rpg I want to run for people. 

This group consists of two of my siblings (A and Ds) and our family friend/adopted sibling (Ct).

I have no idea if using identifers for players is all that helpful, but given each evetually goes through multiple characters and I want to focus on talking more about player dynamics than in-character session notes, its helpful to me sofar, but I don't love the format.

A is *notoriously* difficult to schedule with. He's the eldest of my slblings, always busy with work or projects. My dad ran dnd for us when we were younger, which was our mutual first experiences with rpgs. He's gotten the chance to play at times in his life but I don't think he's ever played in a campaign before this. A is a key players because I can trust him to just make decisions and lead the way if people can't make a decison. 

 Ds is younger than me and loves Dimension 20 and has played a decent amount of 5E. He's one of my always-available players, if I want to test something out for just want to play something *right now*, which happens occasionally. He *loves* to role-play, and reliably his characters are weird or out-there.

Ct, importantly for things that continue to happen as we play, is brand-new to rpgs.

Tools

I made a few differences to my gm tools during this game. This was the start of my trials with Arnold K's Underclock. I also had OSE's Rogue's Gallery on hand and summon an extra hand (good ol' Kargor) to hopefully prevent another TPK like last session. 

Side note: Love the Rogue's Gallery. Each character is interesting, has just enough story, and has unique items and equipment. I think each one has at least one non-essential trinket, which is something I start doing for my players later in the campagn. Some of the random bits of lore end up getting incorporated in my campaign later on, which is now my favorite way of expanding my world.

I also used a table or two from Tome of Adventuring Design to give a little more direction to my players for Hole in the Oak, which is where the exotic meat connoisseur comes from. Mechanically, he is meant to function similarly as the antique collector rumor from Caverns of Thracia (pays ~5-100 gold for each artifact found) but for monster meat. Eww. I tried to make him fun and weird, and I think it was fun.

Oh, I also used Bandit Keep's unarmed combat rules. I happened to have them on hand and they were great for this tbh.

Dungeons

This really was my start to learning how set the scene well in a dungeon, which is a constant struggle. I also just don't like Hole in the Oak, at least I enjoyed it less the more I ran it.

I think if I understood the whole "Mythic Underworld" bit a little more, I would have liked it better. It just felt scattered and too random for my tastes. I don't need a dungeon to have a cohesive story, but I just wanted more connective tissue. It would have helped a lot for one of my first times running an OSR-y dungeon.

Also the Underclock was brutal on the players, in this session and the rest in this dungeon. I retired it after this. Being more experieced now, I am sure I could tweak it a bit more, but the rate of encounters was just too hard for 4 level 1 PCs in this dungeon. Although it did lead to fun some occasions, but mostly just lead to a total party kill.

But that's for a later session. Take care!

 

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!

Update? Question? Rambling?

 I'm running a lot of games right now. Well, I'm running two. Kind of:

Phaedra is what I've been calling the campaign I have been running, named after the barely-faux-ancient-greece region the game has taken place in. 

I am running for two different stable groups, with about 8 sessions with one group and 3 sessions with the other. I've been calling them one 'campaign' since I'm using the same world for both and technically keeping track of both on the same calendar but they've massively diverted in when each is taking place and neither has affected the other (outside of very minor details) so considering them all one big thing is a big of a stretch.

But this brings me to what I wanted to ask about. I have two other games I am looking at getting going:

New Game One: An open-table-ish Halls of Arden Vul game

I like running for my two groups now but scheduling with them is inconsistent and, in particular with one of the groups, usually if any player can't make it, we don't play. This is kind of a big ol' bummer for me every time it happens, because I am keeping myself pretty isolated since I am immuno-compromised and one of my main social avenues is rpgs (it is the main reason that I run a lot of games. That and I don't have a job.)

I want to have a game going that I can schedule with little prep and run with whoever is available, on whatever days I have free (or when I have a canceled session). 

(The Shattered Coast glog server served this purpose for me for a bit, but I grew out of love with the server and how it was organized, also GLOGs in general at this point, and officially left it a month or two ago.)

I chose Halls of Arden Vul because I assumed it was large enough that I could just prep whatever area the group was considering going into, and because I was a fool and was taken in by the promises of it being just really fucking big.

I've done a lot of reading the adventure already, and some prep in distilling some house rules for OSE (I might try running it with OSRIC though? Idk, not an important point right now). 

I'm not here to harp on Arden Vul though, although I'll talk about it more in a moment.

New Game Two: ADND for my dad

I might have mentioned this in my Holiday DND post, but playing with my dad over Christmas re-kindled his interest in playing rpgs. I've also read too much of Anthony Huso's blog and want to try my hand with 1e. He played ADND back in the day, and I want to run some of the old adventures he would recognize (and possibly have played already, but that will be fine honestly, it was 40ish years ago). 

You said you had a question?

Right, so the intention with both of these games is to minimize the type of churn I get stuck on with rpgs. I have a lot of free time and spent too much time writing shit that didn't get to see play. A lot of rules churn and setting churn and campaign churn and I want to avoid getting stuck in that morass again. One of the better things I did for my sanity was just stop writing stuff for my Phaedra games over the holiday break.

 Even though there's hypothetically a lot of little things I want to do for the Phaedra games (everything in this post, for example), I just don't have the energy for it. Spending time in from of screens gives me migraines and I just end up spinning my wheels anyway. It wouldn't feel so bad if it didn't feel extremely masturbatory. I love actually playing games and sharing what I've made with others, but time spending creating something that will never reach anyone else just feels like time spent poorly. Maybe this is the protestant in me, Idk.

I have still not reached my question, yikes.

So, one thought I had to minimize prep was to stick everything I am running into the same world. I wouldn't try to keep a matching calendar for everything, given it wouldn't really matter. I've been toying with using Worlds Without Number for giving factions something to do.

Can I minimize the time I spend on the stuff I find uninteresting (making a complete world) if I just jam everything into one world map? Do I need to worry about this shit? 

This is probably the type of question that is more just asking for permission to do something.

I'm kind of tired of writing, but I have like 20 drafts at this point so Imma just going to post this. 

Happy Friday! 

Family DnD - Highlights

Highlights of a dnd game we played on Christmas day at my family holiday:

- That we played at all! My older brother and I had our plane tickets purchased by our dad a few weeks prior, mostly spontaneously. My younger brother had joked about us playing ‘family dnd’ when we were all home. I had assumed my older brother wouldn’t have enough time to play since he was there much less time, but one of the first things he asked when we picked him up from the airport was ‘so, family dnd?’

We played Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier with OSE: AF. 

- I played an Elf named ‘Marry-no-Man’ (thanks Dolmenwood for that baller name), my older brother played a druid, and my dad played a paladin. Once food was prepared (lasagna I think, it was a Kirkland Christmas this year), we rolled up a Fighter with pretty decent stats for my step-mom. 

Man, elves in B/X are wild. 4000 xp for the first level, and they get to cast in armor and wield any weapons? My character was a blast to play.

- There was a revolving door of hirelings who just kept dying. A group of triplets (Sammy, Samuel, and Sam (F)) I think all ate it due to the poisoning that the crystals in the dungeons can cause. 

- I liked the module, we played it *very fast*, and I’m sure it would have felt different spread over a few more sessions. We didn’t finish because I eventually got a migraine near the end of the night, but I really liked what I played. I enjoyed how much of the dungeon was about interacting with itself, rather than just generic solutions. Like this hallway seem dangerous because of all the crystals, but you can find armor that makes someone immune to the crystal poison and etc. 

- It was a pain in the ass to map accurately though. My brother recommended I do it as a flow chart and that was a much better plan.

- God playing with my step-mom was so fun. The highlight of the whole day for me, for sure. She’s played some video games (will play like diablo with my dad sometimes) and was really distracted but just killed it when she was fully present. She asked the best questions, like ‘what part of this is something you wrote and which parts are you making up?’ and all these other cutting questions. She was not happy with my dad asked to borrow her magic sword. She did a cheer when I burned a bunch of zombies in a pit ‘Give me an F! Give me an I! Give me and R E! What does that spell?’

- My younger brother did an admirable job dm-ing. He was trying to get us through the whole dungeon (I assume at least), so we played some parts pretty fast/loose. Barely any combat, which was neat, it was mostly exploring.

- One thing he did that made me reflect on my own dm-ing experiences was tell us some info that we probably would have gleaned after we killed ourselves doing a dangerous thing. I don’t remember the specific examples, but it’s a tough dungeon to run quickly, given how important it is to communicate some little details, like what exactly is made of the dangerous crystal and what isn’t.

I just…I had a really good holiday. No family was in town besides us, which was a really nice change of pace. Playing dnd was a small part of why my whole holiday was so special, but it was lovely to spend a cold midwestern Christmas inside and just play games with my family.

Sometimes I get caught up in the between-sessions bullshit when dm-ing. Making lists and writing setting info and doing all this unnecessary work, when really just having a reason to play make-believe with your family and friends is the real reason to do any of this. I forget that a lot of the time.

Phaedra - Session 1

 Players and Characters: 

• C: Cassius the Cowardly, a 15 year old child (Thief 1)
• R: Devrin the Devious, a "shyster pyromanic" (Cleric 1)
  
• D: Braum Bitterstout, dwarf. (Dwarf 1)
  

Adventure: Caverns of Thracia

Rules: Old School Essentials: Basic Fantasy

Date: 05/08/2023

Play Summary

We started play in a tavern in a theocratic coastal village, controlled by a cult dedicated to the god Apollo. The tavern featured a constant rotation of religious lectures. The one today was extolling the virtues of purity and trying to sell some books. Devrin tried to light the priest on fire.

After being thrown out of the bar by the local gnoll bouncer, the group decided to hire Otto, a local fisherman and go out exploring the local island they had heard rumors about. They rented a small boat and headed off to the island.

After an hour's sailing, they reached the northeast shore of the island. They made their way to the interior, coming across a few different ruins. They found a dwarven tablet in one, and encountered a group of gnolls lead by a minotaur near the largest ruin. Cassius stayed behind and hid in the bushes while Braum negotiated with the minotaur, and Devrin attempted to light some trees on fire. 

Braum eventually payed the minotaur 5 gold and was told where another entrance was. The group ventured over to the other entrance and was slaughtered by a group of tribespeople lying in wait. The fisherman and Devrin managed to escape with the corpses of their companions and made their way back to sea.

Hello! I was inspired by this post to actually write something in this blog. I have 10 other draft posts that I will maybe edit and post eventually, plus another 12 sessions of my campaign to write up.

This is great, it feels good to write something public after engaging in my own research hole for so long. 

Thanks for reading! Back to talking about the session.

 

Reflections

My perfect world map. This wasn't actually made until a few weeks after the session.

Boy was this a nasty/wild session. This game was intended as a test game. I had spent several months obsessing about OSR-related junk and this was my first time running Old School Essentials (and really just anything with an OSR-vibe). I got together a group of 3 disparate people I know: 

• C is my youngest sibling, a major rpg-head with heaps of experience and is also into OSR stuff
  
• D is a friend from college who I used to play rpgs with
• R is a newer friend who doesn't have much rpg experience (and was very excited to play)

 I had a 4th player but they think R is annoying and didn't want to play.

This took place six months ago, so a lot of the details escape me, but I think we ended up playing around 2 hours. D and C played remotely over discord, and R was supposed to come over and play in person but stayed home instead. I was completely surrounded by books and print outs and graph paper and binders the whole time, plus I had moved my monitor with an arm attachment to my dining table so when R came over, it could still feel like a table-top rpg session.

Important note: I no longer try this hard. First time jitters, you know?

Making characters

I started the session by walking them through building characters. I learned that day that the bane of my existence is explaining where all the little stat modifiers go on an OSE character sheet and I have since moved to having people roll up characters with dnncharacter.com. Still, I think it's good practice to have players go through the process by hand once.

I genuinely don't remember how long this took, or what the players thought about the system or character gen. I am pretty sure C had played before but the others hadn't.

Starting the game

I rolled up the starting town using tables from Maze Rats, which was something I picked up from a post from The Alexandrian long before I knew what OSR was. I tried to add some Greek-theme to fit in with the Caverns. I mentioned Apollo and got a few groans from R (I still don't quite know why? I haven't gone in deep on myths about Apollo though, I just chose the first god that came to mind). The end result was a theocratic village and I conjured up with a Jordan Peterson-esque bitch shilling books at the tavern. 

This Session's "Problem Player"

Boy did my other two players not love it when R had his character try to set the book-shilling priest on fire. 

I had purposely played on R's distaste for Jordan Peterson (a consistent target for our little social group), and I had recently ran a game of Monster Hearts for R and some other friends that featured a slime-y incel-ish teacher that also had JP-vibes. 

So I knew what R was thinking at the time, but the other players didn't. C played along while D waited it out. 

No one really got in the moment later why R was lighting trees on fire. I asked them about it and they said they were trying to make a distraction. I wish I would have just had them clarify in the moment, instead of me just being confused and not interacting with it too much. They explained the 'shyster pyromanic' vibe later on that night, when I was texting them. I think having them explain their thoughts would have gone far to getting the other players on board with what they were putting down.

The rest of it

Honestly I am a bit tired of writing. The rest of the session was fine. I liked the negotiating with the minotaur. I had rolled both of the encounters beforehand and rolled difficult ones for first-level characters to handle. If I run Caverns of Thracia again, I'll probably treat level three as the minimum party level like the feature in Knock #3 recommended.

When the tribespeople ambushed the party and Braum was killed, I succinctly described his head getting lopped off. This would be the first among many times I would regret casually narrating a gruesome character death. 

I remember the energy of the players at the end of the game being ...not good.

I messaged each of the players that night after the game to see if they would want to play again. D didn't want to play with R again and was disappointed that the game wasn't more serious. C said he wasn't sure since he would feel compelled to join in R's debauchery. R said they were excited to play again. 

Legacy

A lot of little details from this session would go on to inform the setting as it came together in the months to come (although ***spoilers*** we have yet to return to the Caverns of Thracia).

I'm not sure if this session was a success for failure. It was a trial, and I definitely learned a lot, which was the goal. 

Thanks for reading if you got this far! I'll be writing up some more sessions soon.

 <3