Session recap 5

This is taken largely from player-written session notes. With any luck I'll be able to do that in the future.

Take heed, and read in awe, the deeds of our intrepid company.

During the last session, our intrepid adventurers regrouped back at the Keep before venturing out once again to thin out the menace lurking in the Caves of Chaos. While in town, they were joined by the large, strapping paladin Borios (and is slightly less-impressive squire, Lars), sent by his order to help root out and end the threat of the undead. Hearing of the Caves of Chaos, Borios was certain that he would be able to lend his sword to good purpose.

Borios was honestly-gotten; after Rori died, the player rolled his stats and got a natural 18 for charisma. Lars was his second character. I recommended he have one in case Borios wouldn't be able to join the party on certain adventures, due to his quest. 

 

Borios is dedicated to rooting out undead in the eastern marches. He's joining the party because his priest told him there have been rumours of occult worship and possibly necromancy at the Caves of Chaos.

 

Unfortunately the players didn't really pick up on that. Oh well.

Prior to departure, the adventurers shared meat and mead at the tavern, and learned of the tragic destruction of a merchant caravan at the hands of a gang of orcs and a hulking, monstrous ogre. The merchant was the sole survivor. Surely there was some connection to the increased activity at the caves. While at the tavern the heroes welcomed into their company also a young noble of the house Steelclan, a noted family of Dwarven metalsmiths. He spoke loudly, brashly, and drunkenly of his deeds, and since the company of heroes sometimes does the same, they brought him in.

After recruiting these new heroes to their cause, the intrepid company set out once again for the caves to continue their ill-advised spelunking, mostly due to poverty. First they stumbled upon a cave long and dank, like a corridor before a great hall, piled high with skulls and bones of animals, men, and elves. The cave ended in a door, massive, wooden, and immovable, with a sign crudely scratched out reading "We'd love to have you for dinner." Since none of the heroes were particularly hungry, and since none of the skeletons stood up, wielded rusty implements, and proclaimed fealty to their necromantic master, Borios and the others thought it best to move on.

 

This was the hobgoblin cave, in case you didn't get that from the description. The players spent a good amount of time discussing whether or not they should break down the door after listening and hearing nothing and checking out the skulls to see if there was anything valuable or informative. Borios' player, who's fairly unassertive when directly asked questions but participates well in the discussions, brought up that there are other caves, and this one seems both difficult and dangerous. So they decided to go down the hill to another cave.

 

I really like my players.

In the next cave, they stumbled upon a massive ogre, who, quickly outwitted by our elven mage Ellarion, was soon fast and quite magically asleep. Juan Pendleton, helpful as always, made sure he didn't wake up. He then shot a mattress he thought was a bear, making certain everyone knew his predilection for wanton violence was still strong.

 

The book is fairly clear: from a distance the ogre's mattress of bearskin and leaves looks like a sleeping bear. Nobody got close enough to tell the difference until after Juan shot it and the arrow just sunk in.

This was the ogre who was involved in the assault on the merchant caravan, along with the goblins who live next door.

 

The encounter with the ogre was actually quite amusing: he heard people rooting around in his other cave and came out for a look. He was suspicious, but didn't immediately attack, partly due to his mercenary inclinations and partly due to the fact that I rolled an effective 10 on his reaction roll. So Ellarion asked if he'd like to hear a song.

 

Sleep is a very powerful spell indeed.

Within the cave, our heroes discovered the fresh remains of a retinue of men and elves, surely the merchants overtaken on the road. A tragic end to good folk, though they were certainly not the only to fall victim to such a gruesome fate. The ogre kept a vast store of treasure. Coins silver and gold by the sackful, a mammoth wheel of good, hard cheese, and a cask of fine brandy, for which Pious Inebrius most certainly did not trip over the others to claim. Nestled near (or, rather, firmly beneath) the remains of the poor souls who fell victim to the ogre were also a magic scroll and several elegant arrows. Ellarion claimed these, being the only one who knows anything about runes or the proper way to use a bow.

While on the road, the intrepid company was overtaken by a pack of orcs, and Borios, fluent in orc, invited them to take the hard cheese the company found, and refrain from trying to kill our heros. The leader of that filthy band graciously accepted, and left under the slightly misguided notion that the cheese was somehow made from ogre milk.

This was a random encounter on my table for the wilderness around the Keep. The players saw the orcs first, but given they were laden down with treasure and without a sleep spell, they felt it was best to parley. These are orcs from tribe B, though the players haven't taken the time to figure that out. Fortunately for them, with the cheese in the hands of an underling the boss orc of this little raiding party agreed to say he never saw the party if they left each other alone.

Shortly after setting camp, along came a band of merchants, the chiefest of which was rather fussy, rotund, and not particularly friendly. They also being bound for the Keep. The two parties rested separately, and arrived within a short span of one another the following morning.

The dice were hot for random encounters.

Upon returning triumphantly to the Keep, our heroes conducted themselves in a properly heroic fashion. They deposited their hard-earned monetary spoils at the local bank, learning to their dismay that many of the coins were counterfeit hunks of lead in gold leaf. With the remaining coin, they reserved rooms at the local inn. Borios spoke with Theodoric, who commended him for his service, and offered lodging to Borios and Lars both (and free stabling for Borios' monstrously large steed). He encouraged Borios to continue to focus his efforts on the cave.

 

There was some talk about not turning in the coins and trying to pass them as currency around the keep rather than taking the value of the gold. The banker pointed out as gently as he could that he already knew about these coins, and would be very, very upset if they showed up in circulation.

 

Theodoric is the curate of the church in the Keep.

 

The party also decided to rent one of the Keep's apartments for six months with some of their recent windfall. I ruled this would mean that staying in town for a week would cost 2 gold each, instead of 10, meaning it would pay itself off quickly. Minus incidental expenses, of course. 

Ellarion learned from the clerics that the scroll is indeed a divine one and promised to give it to Pious, who should be able to make good use of it provided he's sober enough.

Celebrating, as always, at the tavern, our intrepid company continued to gain in popularity with the locals. They wooed away from the merchant his men-at-arms, John and Teddy, who offered a step discount for their services and promised to recruit their comrades, Otus, Langard, Sigurd, and Helga, to the cause of adventure. Pious soothed the ego of the preening merchant, Edward, and promised to give him first pick of any "liberated" dry goods the company may find amongst the caves. Edward offered an 80% purchase price, far to generous. Pious and Edward then shared in the holy rite of most-certainly-not-Bacchus, and subsequently passed out.

 

Edward is the same merchant they met on the road, and out from under whom they rented the last apartment at the Keep. Originally he was seethingly upset that the party had done so, but Pious was so persuasive that that's smoothed over now. It helps that he's also a worshipper of Bacchus, so he considers Father Pious as one of his own.

 

 Just as a side note, Langard is actually an old veteran hireling of the Caves of Chaos: he was hired by the first group I ever ran this module for. As such, he knows a thing or two about the caves.

 

There were quite a few hijinks in town with Pious getting very drunk and sharing coin and brandy all over the place, not to be outdone by Heinrich or Juan. This was the session I changed the house rules for XP: they had to spend their gold if they wanted to earn anything from it. The results were both amusing and entertaining. 

Where will the adventure take our heroes next? To the mysterious ruins to the south, setting up an expedition to explore and collect artifacts of immense and arcane power? To the town of Hommlet, to combat the growing threat of the Temple of Elemental Evil and its pernicious influence on an otherwise peaceful village? Or will they once again brave the Caves of Chaos, facing down evils both ancient and contemporary, fighting for the honor of their fallen brethren? The world is in need of their efforts, which they will happily lend in full force. After, of course, they attend Mass.

 

After discussion, the players decided to stick to the Caves of Chaos. There was a good bit of interest in the ruins to the south (which happen to be the Caverns of Thracia), but they finally decided against it after tabulating the costs: they'd have to either set up a nearby base-camp and pay their day-laborers and men-at-arms to staff it, or risk walking both ways through the swamp and jungle each time they wanted to find the place again.

Session recap 3 and 4

Late in the week of the party's convalescence, a new sage moved into town, taking residence in Father Jovian's old apartment. His name is Cedric, though they still haven't asked. His specialties are (major) old Imperial history and geography and (minor) monstrous humanoids. My rules for sages are sort of a vague nod to AD&D; sages generally have an area of major expertise and an area of minor expertise. In their major area, they can reliably answer all questions but the sort nobody would know, plus general related questions. In their minor area, sages can reliably answer questions any specialist might know the answer to, but nothing absolutely specific. Either way, it takes 100 gp and a week's time to answer questions that aren't merely general in nature, plus any costs of materials.

Once I'd explained the difference between going to a sage and just listening for rumours (more expensive, but the answer is guaranteed accurate, and if he doesn't know he'll refund your money) the players decided it would be a good idea to visit Cedric. They asked him for a couple maps of the local area; one just around the Keep, and another of the wilderness a few days beyond. He readily agreed, and they came to terms of 50 gp now, 50 gp on delivery if they're satisfied with the map. Swallowing his pride because Cedric is a travelling sage whose reputation has not yet shown itself around here, he agreed.

Meanwhile, the party has been getting a bit of a reputation as the Slayers of the Basilisk. The local townsfolk have been showing them respect, buying them drinks, and generally treating them like minor celebrities.

After their week of healing, they decided to head back out to the newly christened Basilisk Cave to see if they couldn't find out any more information or ferret out any more treasure. Since they knew the location, they could easily go back. (I didn't roll a 1, they didn't get lost.)

When they got there, they immediately noticed that the smell had changed - more musky, less acrid. Sending the elf to peek his head in, they discovered a bear had taken up residence and was currently napping. Considering the problem for a good long while of quiet back-and-forth outside the cave, they decided the smartest course was to Sleep the bear, then slit its throat. Further discussion led to spending a day smoking the bear meat and trying to salvage the pelt (that didn't go well).

Braving the cave again, they decided to retrace their steps to the basilisk room. There they found the statues of their erstwhile friends, as well as the unmolested corpse of the basilisk, still fairly fresh. Turns out basilisk is highly poisonous. Pablo had a stroke of genius, then: he jimmied off one of the lizard's scales. Pius quickly decided to help, and they managed to remove the rest after a short bit of bloody work.

Meanwhile the party bust down the rest of the doors uninterrupted, finding all the rooms to be much like the first two, with only the mummified lizard as the object of possible value. (It actually is worth ~100 GP to an apothecary for various medical preparations, but they still haven't asked anyone.)

The one room on the west wall was different. It looked more ornate, though in monkish fashion; it had a tapestry so old and rotted away it could not be discerned and crumbled into wet dust at the first touch on the north wall, and the old 'dresser' and 'bed' were inconspicuously carved with symbols of snakes and other reptilian figures. Then the elf noticed that the stone of the southern wall didn't quite meet the joint, and after a little inspection they found that it was a secret door designed to slide to one side.

Cue the search for the trigger, which took much longer than it should have because they searched everywhere it wasn't, including the northern wall (with its own secret door that they failed to find, concealing the as-yet unpillaged temple treasury). Eventually they found  press switch recessed under the lip of the bed, and the door slid back. They were unable to make sense of what was revealed: an old collapsed bed with what looked like an ancient elven mummy/skeleton on top of it. However, they did make sense of the torc it wore, and took that before leaving to explore further, neglecting to search and so not finding the box of silver handcuffs underneath the remains of the bed.

Pressing on through the bronze doors, they came to what was a dining hall, and the explanation of what became of this place. There was a hole in the ceiling, and under it was the remains of an old bronze cage. Seated at the long table were six extremely realistic statues of lizard men, albeit with some anatomical oddities - larger crania, finer fingers, and (though they didn't get close enough to see this) the suggestion of feathers.

Poking around the room they didn't find much of interest - all the cookware long since degraded, the sound of dripping water coming from the hole - but Elarian did check the doorway to the southwest. He heard snakes, lots of slithering snakes, and saw that the walkway ended in a jagged break-off not that far along. The party decided to avoid the 'snake-pit', thereby avoiding the one treasure I really hoped they'd find. Alas.

Instead they poked their way up through the ceiling, finding a natural cavern. Faced with a choice, they curved left, coming eventually to a widening cavern that something-or-other was using as a trash-heap. After poking around in the trash and getting freaked out when some of it moved, they discovered that a) it was covered with a sticky, tarry substance, and b) magic missile didn't make it stop moving.

Player of Pius: "Wait, did we just strike oil?" (No, no you didn't. You found an immature black pudding.)

Losing interest, they went further, heading straight instead of right at another fork. This is when they found a foul-smelling cavern and the source of the weeping and moaning that had been suffusing the whole place. The floor was covered with pools of green goop. And at the back of the cavern, a shambling pile of the stuff, whence the cries, reared up and started shuffling toward them. When a Sleep spell didn't put it down, they took the wise course and decided to bug out and back to town.

Personally, I'm proud of this encounter. The shambling pile of goop is actually a troll who years ago was exposed to green slime. It has been eating away at him ever since, but his natural regeneration has kept him from completely succumbing, though it is somewhat compromised now, as are his Hit Dice. He's quite insane as well from the pain. However, what he wants most of all is for it to stop, so as soon as someone thinks to use fire, he would gladly just sit down and burn to death. Perhaps not terribly original, but I like the combination.

Anyhow, back in town the players decided to wait for the completion of their map, taking odd jobs and living off the fame of being the basilisk slayers for a bit. In the meanwhile, Pablo and Elarian took the scales to the local leatherworker and had him make a pair of cloaks, for which there was just enough material because this was for an elf and a halfling.

When the maps were ready (a subject of a different post), they went to see Cedric and managed to avoid paying any more for his work by instead bargaining information and their incomplete map of the Caves of the Unknown. Cedric was ecstatic - it's not every day you make a brand new discovery - and now considers the party his friends. Which doesn't mean he'll charge them less, but it does mean he likes them and is willing to put their commissions first - excepting of course the Lord of the Keep, by whom he hopes to be kept on retainer.

Armed with their new maps, the PCs set out for the Caves of Chaos. Amusingly, they came at them backward, which is to say through the woods from the direction of the Caves of the Unknown rather than from the road as Gary intended. Because of this, the kobolds hiding in the tree don't see them, and they naturally decide to check out the first cave mouth:

 

 

 

This one right here. The one with the gnolls.

They poke their heads in and come quickly upon the gnoll guard picket. The gnolls don't immediately attack, because they want to know what these strange people want in their cave. However, two of them do go off to rouse the others, just in case. Meanwhile the party attempts to communicate once it becomes clear this isn't necessarily a fight, but it turns out none of them speak Gnollish. (This is actually a question in play; I'm using a house rule to determine language selection.) Then the elf opens his mouth to bring attention to himself, having previously been in the back.

Gnolls hate elves with a passion. So they open fire. Gim is seriously injured, but not dead. (0 hp) The party rushes the gnolls, who somehow manage to not only hold off these superior numbers but actually inflict wounds and strike down Pablo when he takes a swing at one of their shins. Morale broken, the party runs, picking up Gim but leaving Pablo's body behind. That's fine; gnolls love halflings!

After patching Gim up enough so he can walk, the party returns to town to lick their wounds and plan. They buy lots of oil, some buckets, and some rope. They also consult Cedric.

It turns out that gnolls hate and fear uncontrolled fire. Also, they have very sensitive noses with a keen sense of smell. Which means, one of the players realizes, that one way to disable them would be to muck with their sense of smell - much like how if you want to get bloodhounds off your trail, you spread cayenne pepper along the ground. The party promptly thanks Cedric and goes off to buy as much powered horseradish as they can get their greedy mits on.

An aside: the party's Magic User, Jib, is a halfling with strange ideas. Rather than considering what he does magic, he calls it 'vougence' and carries around a large, complicated, tubular piece of machinery he calls the Elliptotron. It is with this that he casts Magic Missile.

The horseradish thus acquired, it is decided, can be stuffed down the barrel of the Elliptotron and, if Jib prepares Magic Missile that day, he can shoot it out one 'dose' at a time. Or, if he actually casts Magic Missile, it will all come out in a sort of Poor Man's Dust of Sneezing and Choking. He has enough for six such 'doses'.

Also in town they run across Juan, Pablo's brother who got a letter from his dear sibling and came out to help him make his fortune. Alas, too late, but he has the family resemblance.

Back to the gnoll cave at slightly after dawn, the party sets up their trap. First, they saturate the ground outside the cave with oil. Jib, Elarian and Pius hide above the cave. Gim and Rori, a new fighter from a new player that night, flank the cave to take care of any gnolls who come out. The plan is for Juan to run in, insult the gnolls so they run after him, and then dash back out. When the gnolls are outside the cave, those above will drop buckets of oil on them, and then light it on fire.

The plan works fairly well, except that one of the gnolls is missed by his bucket. Regardless, they burn nicely. However, as before two of the gnolls had gone further into the cave to bring out reinforcements. We ended up with an archery battle across the burning pit, which was something of a standoff because, while the gnolls had more HP, they only had one bow.

Eventually it became clear to the party that the rest of the gnolls had no intention of coming out and facing the fire, which was dying down at that point anyway. Plucking up their courage, Gim, Jib, Elarian, and Rori rush into the cave to face off the ~8 gnolls gathered there, hoping to put them out of commission with Jib's Magic Missile. Unfortunately this proves to be a tactical mis-step, as Rori takes an axe to the skull and Jib is cut down before he can finish the spell. Elarian rushes to take up the Elliptotron and finish the work. One of the gnolls slices into him as well, but he manages to hang onto consciousness just long enough to loose the powder. (He was at exactly 0 HP; I rolled to see if he managed to keep the spell and if he managed to get it off before losing consciousness.) Down went the gnolls, too concerned with the excruciating pain in their noses to put up a fight, and the PCs promptly slit their throats. The final casualty list was 3 PCs to 12 gnolls; pretty good for level 1.

Then, rather than press forward, they decided to retire back to town. They were severely depleted, and it was late. We'll pick this up again in the coming Saturday, though we'll be down one player, because he moves this week to sunnier pastures. Hopefully we can find a replacement. (If not, 3 is an acceptable number for now.)

Meanwhile the gnoll chieftan has to figure out what to do about his depleted tribe. The PCs are going to take at least a couple days to recuperate, so the bugbears are going to come sniffing about, smelling weakness. However, they'll be repulsed once they find there are still 13 able-bodied gnolls. The gnolls will send to their disaffected kin in the Moathouse, but they won't arrive for months. However, all the males that are normally in the common room will be stationed in the entrance, and they'll have built a makeshift barricade out of the old burnt table, broken chairs, and mounds of earth and branches.

Start of a new campaign + Sessions 1 and 2 recap

The game I'm running now is based on Swords & Wizardry. Originally we were using the Core Rules, but I quickly switched to the Complete rules once I found out they were actually available for free. There's practically no difference; Complete has a few optional classes, and it says a little bit more about Strongholds, wilderness, and monsters. All of the mechanics I've been able to track down are the same, though.

It actually started quite a while after the GURPS DF game finished; I and a couple friends from my former workplace went to a local con, and there I convinced them to play with me in a S&W White Box game. They loved it. For this reason I seriously considered sticking with the White Box rules, but I had done a few test runs with that system and knew I wanted to eventually move to something slightly more complicated, with things like variable weapon damage and hit points. I figured making the move at first was easier than making it later.

I rustled up two extras, two of whom had never played D&D before but were interested, and I gave them the choice: they could start in Hommlet or they could start in the Keep. They chose the Keep. Since I'm all about player choice, I told them that Hommlet was a few days to the east and that there were rumours of an old set of ruins a few days through the swamp to the south. (The Caverns of Thracia.) So far they've only been interested in the Caves, which is fine by me.

The setting is intentionally vague, and at least so far hasn't diverged much from  the "medieval fantasy" background assumption of D&D. I'm running it like Points of Light, by which I mean the PCs are all from "the Realm" of which the Keep is the easternmost fortress, but the area they consider civilization they could walk across in a couple weeks. What else is out there? That's a good question, but it's not uninhabited. The Realm just considers them all "barbarians and savages with whom we sometimes trade."

A thousand years ago, The Empire collapsed as it was overrun by barbarian hordes. They left behind ruins, artifacts, etc. etc. The Church of the Realm is the Church of Sol Invictus. Alignments are based around this: if you're Lawful, you believe in Sol Invictus (or perhaps a related god, outside the Realm), civilization as a righteous thing, and all that. If you're Neutral, you don't really care one way or another. Perhaps you've lapsed, or perhaps you follow the Old Ways (druidic paganism). If you're Chaotic, you're opposed to Sol Invictus for some reason - maybe you don't believe in this civilization, maybe you worship one of the Darker Gods, or whatever. Notably, Magic Users are always chaotic, because the arcane forces they toy with twist them, and elves are always Chaotic because they're closely aligned with the Fae.

Generally, I'm going for a Dark Ages Europe feel. There's a Constantinople out there somewhere, but the PCs don't know about it.

Class levels also exist as an in-game phenomenon. In order to gain class levels, you travel to one of the 'navels of the world' - places of old power that the priests and scribes used to be controlled and sanctified by the Empire before it collapsed, and that are now sacred to Sol Invictus. If you go to a Lawful one, you come out either as a Fighter or a Cleric. If you go to a Chaotic one, you can come out as a Fighter, Cleric, or Thief. Naturally the Church doesn't admit that Chaotic navels (generally, those controlled by entities not aligned with Sol Invictus) exist, and they claim that the power of the navels comes from Sol Invictus. It certainly seems like they're partially right, what with Lawful Clerics getting blessings in line with the powers of Sol.

In order to become a Magic User, you find another Magic User to expose you to the secret artifacts and eldritch rituals.

Further, if someone has class levels, you can tell. They have a sort of mystical charisma and an air of competence - Fighters move with more grace and self-assurance than mere men-at-arms. Clerics are also obvious, and thieves are if they want to be, or to each other.

Anyhow, I have four sessions to quickly recap for posterity. I won't bother to make a distinction between the sessions at this point, but later I'll be writing recaps as they happen. (Mostly for my benefit. I don't like writing them, but they're a good place to stick information I need to keep track of that showed up in the session.)

When the curtain opened, we had:
Gim - a Lawful dwarven Cleric
Tiny - a Lawful Fighter
Pius Inebrius - a Chaotic Cleric who worships Bacchus
Elarion - an Elf Fighter/Magic-User
Buddha - a Neutral Cleric to a dead god

They spent the session meandering around the Keep, seeing the sights and meeting the locals. They heard a few rumours about the Caves of Chaos - like how the big dogmen live high in the caves, while the little dogmen live low, and how there's a huge vault of treasure in the southernmost caves, but also a wizard who would kill all trespassers - that I probably need to remind them of because it's been long enough I bet they've forgotten. They spent some time in the Traveller's Rest Inn, the name of the tavern and inn in the Keep, and recruited a few local laborers for their expedition. They also encountered the Curate of the Keep, along with the traveling priest and his two initiates, the latter group of whom readily agreed to go out with them to vanquish the evil in the Caves! These were Theodoric, Jovian, Bob, and Ted respectively. Those of you who remember the module know that Father Jovian is both Chaotic and evil, so he's coming along to make sure they fail and die.

Come the next morning they set out early, though they lost Buddha for a halfling ne'er-do-well named Pablo (who sports a Gordito moustache). They stopped by the Church for Theodoric's blessing, and he confided in Gim that he didn't exactly trust Jovian.

Off they went and promptly realized they didn't know where they were going other than 'off west somewhere near the road'. They turned north after about half a day on the road, cut through the forest, and finally found a very large clearing on the hillside. They set up camp because it was getting late, and resolved to keep searching come morning.

After a night-time diversion involving orcs that caused no casualties but netted no information, either (Jovian was the only one who spoke Orcish, and he wasn't about to tell the party that these guys were from the Caves or anything useful), they set about continuing to search. After a few hours poking through the clearing, Elarion found an opening into the hillside.

Again, those of you who know the module know that this was not the Caves of Chaos, but rather the Caves of the Unknown.

They gathered round the cave mouth and Tiny shouted inside. That's when the 28 stirges flew out and latched on to one of the laborers, Ted, and Gim. Fortunately for the party they were able to free Gim before he died. Ted and the laborer weren't so lucky, but at least most of the stirges stayed attached to them for the next few rounds, so the rest of the party managed to survive.

Entering the cave, they noticed immediately that it was quite strange, and very old. The stone was worked, but rather than being square, the walls, floor, and ceiling were all gently curved. The place also stank of ammonia and moisture, moreso when the short entryway opened into a large chamber with a tunnel northeast and another to the west that was clearly the place the stirges had been roosting. It also had a small raised area to the north, with a low rock platform that was strewn with the same bones and ammoniac junk that covered the floor. Examining this, they discovered that the thing was likely an altar of some sort, carved with bas-reliefs of snakes and other reptiles in various poses. They also found a small jade statue of a twining snake, which they took.

Deciding the take the northeast tunnel, they discovered that it opened into another smaller room at the end, with several molded wooden doors on the east, north, and west walls, and a pair of large corroded bronze valves ajar to the south. They set about busting down the nearest wooden door, which was still miraculously intact (carved with a snake sigil) but swollen into the doorframe. They sent Pablo in, where he found a large, dusty mess of what looks like it used to be plant fibers all over the room, a low dresser made of stone, and a low sleeping platform at the back of the room. The only thing of potential value he found was in the dresser - a mummified lizard, in the same drawer as a bunch of old stone knives and scalpels, some crusted with ancient blood. He pocketed it and moved on.

Meanwhile the rest of the party was looking around the main room and decided to bust down a few more of these doors to see what was inside. This much noise naturally attracted the interest of the basilisk in the next room, who came to investigate.

Basilisks in my game are very much what you might think - dog-sized lizards who turn creatures to stone. Specifically, you have to look the basilisk in the eyes, which themselves are made of large rubies. They're also immortal and don't need to eat, but constantly ravenously hungry (since most things they try to eat turn to stone before they can).

However, a properly alchemically mummified lizard is proof against this power, and in fact will turn the basilisk to stone if struck by one. Basilisks know this, and are mesmerized by the lizards when presented. (It's a sort of terror; the basilisk is caught between that and the ravenous hunger, and makes a save each round to continue attacking. I made up that mechanic on the spot.)

It took the party a good while to figure out the lizard was why Pablo wasn't turned to stone when the basilisk looked directly at him several times after he stabbed it in the kidneys. By that time, Jovian, Bob, and Pius had already turned to stone, and the surviving laborers had beat feet. It was still nearly a TPK, because they never figured out that striking the basilisk would petrify it. By the end, only Pablo and Tiny remained un-stoned, and Tiny only because he had his guts ripped out.

Fortunately, fresh basilisk blood is an antidote to petrification. It's also a very valuable alchemical reagent, mostly for Stone to Flesh unguents that manage to stretch it further. Pablo, being a worldly sort, knew this. He'd never slaughtered an animal before, but after a few mistakes he managed to get enough blood out of the creature for the four stoned party members to be reversed. (He got lucky; I rolled a d4 for doses. Originally there was a d8, but he wasted quite a bit of blood on the floor.)

After this, the party retired to lick their wounds for a week in the Keep. Turning back from stone is a physically stressful occurrence, and they needed some time off.

This post is getting really long, so I'm going to split the other two sessions off into another post. I'll also write up a little on the Caves of the Unknown.

Post-mortem on a blog (and campaign)

Those of you who were following this blog before have by now no doubt noticed that it is dead. Dead, dead, dead. It was merely wounded, once, and the surgeon did all he could, but after hours of frankly gruesome work on the operating table, up to his elbows in readership, he finally relented and declared it dead.

The campaign it chronicled limped on, at first unharmed by this admission. But it too died, grown alien and bizarre to the wishes of both its creator and its players. It reached a natural point, and so we graciously led it into the stall and quietly shot it in the head. We were all agreed: it was a mercy killing.

Here's the autopsy, in no particular order, for both the blog and the campaign.

Part of the problem was just the group and the group dynamics. Rather than being a gaming group, this is more a group of friend(ish) people who get together to game. The distinction I'm making is primarily that the attitude toward actually getting down to brass tacks and playing your character is much more relaxed, and at least two people are there primarily to shoot the shit with friends. Also, the social order comes first, meaning you can't, for example, kick people out of your game if they're not a good fit for whatever reason. Problems that stem from this were in no particular order:

• Some players never bothered to really learn the rules. This in turn made not only play but character creation a chore.
• There was one disruptive player in particular, who could not be excised without probable dissolution of the game anyway.

In addition, character creation was a chore. GURPS, with templates, computer assistance and good knowledge of the options, is not hard to make a character for. However, even with those assumptions it still doesn't beat 3d6 in order. It just can't. Even if you shave it down to take less time (say, experienced GURPS player vs. never rolled up a character in D&D) it still involves more thought and complexity. This is bad for a game where life is cheap, not only because it raises the barrier to entry, but it also shifts some of the emphasis of player decisions into making the character rather than playing the game. (More on this in another post, if people want.)

Further, creating content for the game was becoming a chore. True, I'd already converted the Moathouse and portions of the Temple, come up with random encounter tables and cool stuff, and so forth, but still. The difference in the systems got to be too great. As an example, in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the emphasis on tactical combat is at odds with D&D's low-level focus on exploration and problem solving, which meant that I had to do a lot of 'sprucing up' of the dungeon in order to make it both interesting and a challenge. Another way to look at it is that the Temple became not only a chore, but a boring one - I would have been better off writing a dungeon for DF from scratch. The game assumptions, from how to play to how rewards work, were too fundamentally different for me to remain interested in the task of reconciling them.

Am I saying that you can't play 'Old School' GURPS DF? Absolutely not. Not only do I still personally believe that is possible, but +Peter V. Dell'Orto's group proves that it can be done. But I am saying that method wasn't right for me at the time, and wasn't right for my group.

All of that also makes it pretty clear why the blog died, with a couple of added points:

• The blog itself began to feel like a chore. When I started running out of things to say, I kept trying to push myself to say more. I forgot that I intended to be a gamer who put stuff here to help myself and other people out, not a content provider. In particular, scheduling myself and expecting myself to stick to the schedule was a bad idea.
• This fed back on my natural cycles of industry, laziness, and guilt. Especially as unfinished draft posts and unwritten play reports backed up, crying out to be written.

Postscript

For those who absolutely, positively must know what happened after Calowas died, what follows is a hyper-abbreviated run-through of the rest of the campaign.

The player of Calowas brought in a bard, and they all went back out to the Moathouse again. They found that it was now populated by a group of gnolls, previously down in the basement and now broken with Lareth. They ambushed the gnolls pretty effectively and had a fairly one-sided skirmish before the surviving gnolls retreated. While they were picking through the bodies, they discovered that there were also some goblins when the gnolls sent in their goblin thralls to make a truce.

A truce was made, involving non-aggression and information on the one side, and money on the other. The party proceeded downstairs and found Lubash the ogre, who killed the scout and the druid (new player) before being brought to bay. Picking through his stuff they found enough treasure to call it a day.

Coming back, they went down again, skipped past the zombie crypts once more to check out what was beyond the ogre, and found in a large dead-end room a bunch of bugbears. The bard went to 'talk' to them, and found they were pretty well set up, being bugbears - hiding behind an overturned table, ready in ambush by the entrance, etc. They quickly negotiated a monetary truce, and while the bugbears were waiting for the party to throw in the money the party instead threw in a Stench cloud. Bugbears stumbled out wheezing one at a time and the party whacked them all.

Wandering around a bit more, the party found the other end of Lareth's guards and had a long conversation that ended with the party apparently agreeing to go see Lareth. The sergeant told them to put down their arms and follow him, which is when the bard (same player as Calowas) again shot one of them. Cue pitched battle in the hallway with the wizard saving the day with a Mass Sleep spell. After this they go to see Lareth, who is presented as pretty hoss (like he is in the Temple - fourth level Cleric with magic plate and a rod of striking), so they listen to him and are on the verge of possibly joining up when they (still primarily elves despite casualties) find out he worships Lolth.

Cue another battle, this time in magical Darkness against a death-touching cleric (Rod of Striking = 2d deathtouch per blow) which ended well for the party due to a couple lucky hits from the Knight and then the Barbarian getting her big mitts on Lareth and smashing his head into the ceiling repeatedly. His guards didn't have a chance to come in and help him because the party was wisely blocking the door at the same time.

After that, the party looted all the stuff in Lareth's room and on his body (a very nice haul indeed) and we called that the end of the campaign.

 

So what now?

Some corpses are not quite what they appear.

First blood! After play report 7

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj) - absent
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

Hirelings:
John Porter, employed as a laborer and horse-hand by the party
Titus Longfellow, employed as a man-at-arms by Isildel
Matthias Wimbledon, novice of St. Cuthbert, employed by Calawas

This was a short session, so not too much happened. The party was down at the back end of a hole that had turned into a worked stone passage leading underneath the Moathouse, confronted with a sliding wall behind which they heard voices.

After a lot of dithering on their part, the party decided to force the issue, and the thief got out his crowbar. Assisted by the resident muscles and nearly herniating himself, Calowas finally levered up the wall, after which the barbarian went about lifting and holding it. When he'd gotten the wall about half-way up, the party heard from the other side the shouted words, "Hold! Stop and identify yourselves!" and saw four pairs of boots and four sets of chainmailed legs.

Calowas lost no time and dropped to one knee to fire his bow. He saw four men, dressed in heavy mail and wearing black tabards with a yellow eye in the center, with leveled crossbows. He shot, but his arrow bounced off the chest of the man he fired at.

They shot, and their bolts didn't bounce. Two sank into Calowas' chest, puncturing his lung and spleen. One missed, going wide and bouncing back along the corridor, and the last blew a hole right through Chief's leg. She fell, dropping the wall and frothing into a berserk rage from the pain.

The one saving grace here was that the barbarian was both crippled and without her hammer to hand. She promptly tried punching out the dwarf, who calmly blocked while the Wizard spun up his Sleep spell.

After she calmed down, Matthias rushed forward to check on Calowas, who as it turns out was still alive but badly in need of surgery, which he attempted to provide. Unfortunately, the enterprising thief bled out before his lung could be patched up properly.

That's the point where the party decided to head home to cut their losses and come up with another plan of attack.

Notes

This marks the first death, and the splitting of the family. Really, Calowas has been asking for it for a long while now, going off alone and fighting things while severely wounded.


It seems like my players are under the impression, despite my warnings to the contrary, that they can 'win' every encounter. Hopefully this cured them of that.

The guards have ST 30 crossbows. They can wind them up with a crank well enough, but they're definitely a fire-and-forget deal. I wasn't sure I wanted to do this, since some part of me still doesn't want to take such advantage of the rules, and 4d+4 imp seems kind of harsh, especially four times. Still, I went with it because I'd have no qualms if the guards were PCs, which seems a pretty fair test when the PCs are supposed to be special because of point totals only.

Down the back way: After Play Report 6

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

Hirelings:
John Porter, employed as a laborer and horse-hand by the party
Titus Longfellow, employed as a man-at-arms by Isildel
Matthias Wimbledon, novice of St. Cuthbert, employed by Calawas

Our intrepid heroes came back to Hommlet with purses considerably fuller than when they left it last to the smell of smoke in the air. The villagers seemed tense, and the half-trained militia was out in more force than before, but life seemed to be going on as usual. They stopped to weather the night in the Inn of the Welcome Wench, where Volbak once again discovered ale and they learned that a great amount of smoke had come from the Moathouse a few days ago and put everyone on edge, though the plume was out now. Had the Moathouse burnt down in their absence?

There was only one way to tell, so after sunrise and Master Gundigroot's impeccable victuals they reclaimed their ponies and set off on the old overgrown trail.

It wasn't long before they found the Moathouse and the source of smoke. Someone had burned a wide, wobbly circle - three hundred feet, give or take a little - around the whole thing, razing off the underbrush and making unmarked approach basically impossible.

They did the sensible thing and set up camp outside the circle in the swamp - an uncomfortable and wet affair, but also unmarked so far as they could tell - and decided to spy out the surrounds.

 The first thing they discovered is that someone had worked to close a portcullis over the entrance to the Moathouse, though the drawbridge was still down, half-rotted as it was. Lamaevhun saw no real signs of occupancy, but as he poked around in the bog outside the kill-zone he stumbled across a large, foul-smelling hole in the ground about six hundred feet out, big enough for two men abreast and tall enough for a man on horseback.


He went back and informed the party, and after some discussion, they decided to leave John with the horses and the camp and head down the hole to see where it went. They got there without incident and started filing down the hole, finding that it was a nasty, rank and foul den of something or other - bones strewn about the place, along with offal and other filth - when, just Titus (keeping rearguard) stepped down the rampish first portion to the dank inside, he crumpled like a sack of meat.

Amalia and Lamaevhun were in back, and luckily heard the sound of rattling armor and the dull thud as the hireling went down. They turned around and were faced with a large, hairy, foetid beast with a nasty-looking club in one hand splattered with blood and a questionable-looking bag in the other.

Things weren't looking that good. Titus was dead, and the two people who could reach his assailant were the Cleric and the Scout. Lamaevhun lost no time drawing and shooting, and Amalia drew her sword and attacked, but the whatever-it-was didn't seem hardly fazed. It just dodged out of the way, took a cursory swipe at Amalia, and started dragging Titus off, though they could tell it had a hard time with his heavy body. Meanwhile the rest of the party wasn't really in position to help: Chief and Volbak were in the front, far enough away from the melee to take too much time getting there.

Meanwhile Chief had found some kind of impaling stick trap down there in the murk and Calawas went forward to look at it.

Fortunately, Isildel was in the middle and had by now forced his way to the back, and Amalia got in one lucky swing that made the whatever-it-was think twice about dragging off Titus. It dropped him, kicked something in the bushes that put up a jangling of bells much further down in the hole, and for a few seconds there was a sort of chase - them slowed by the bog, it slowed by its wounds - before it dropped down into the reeds and disappeared right before their eyes.

Isildel wasn't having that. He didn't know exactly where it was, but exactly isn't necessary with threshold magic, so soon there was a  12-yard wide fire. Up popped the nasty with a howl and booked it out of the fire...then lay down again.

That's fine. 12 yards wasn't enough? How about THIRTY?! I AM AN ANGRY WIZARD!

Yeah, it was kinda like that.

Up it popped again, howling louder than before. After a few seconds, it collapsed in the middle of the blaze. About thirty seconds later as the three were trudging back to the hole, there was a loud explosion and some differently-colored tongues of flame for a bit, then all was still.

(Fortunately for them, the fire didn't catch on its own too well, what with the swampy terrain.)

Oh, and it turned out that Matthais checked Titus over and found that he wasn't really dead, just very close. Some magical healing fixed that up well enough and, after a bit of rest around the entrance to the hole, the party went back in. Calowas had long since disarmed the primitive tension trap.

About fifty feet further down the hole, it became a tunnel of wet but dressed stone and took on a gentle but definite downward slope. After another few hundred feet, Calowas in front heard what he took to maybe be voices and the scrape of leather against stone, so they doused the arrow they'd been using as a light source (Continual Light) and he crept forward in the dark.

Pretty soon he found a wall. Feeling along it, the edges seemed like they fit into grooves in the tunnel walls, as though this thing were meant to be lifted out of place. Putting his ear to the wall, he heard muffled voices beyond.


==================================

Notes

This session showcased two things very well: One was the true potential nastiness of an absurdly high level of stealth (aided by Chameleon and Camouflage) on the part of the bugbear. -20 for being in plain sight and being watched when you drop into cover? No problem! The other was the advantages of Threshold Magic as a system.

Isildel was able to throw gross magical power at the problem to solve it. At the same time, I could see Martin making the decision, "Do I want to blow all my tally now, on this? Or do I save it up for something else, and dribble it out a little at a time?" So far, a Tally of 30 has worked fairly well, and it promotes real decision-making about a limited resource.

For some reason, session recaps are really hard for me to write, and I think that's part of why I've been negligent with this blog (on top of everything else). I still have a lot to do, though. Since the best way to do a difficult task is to actually sit down and do it, I'm going to post the rest of the session recaps until I'm all caught up. Any further ideas I have can always sit as draft posts.

Random Encounter tables are useful: After play report 5

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

The PCs had decided to head back to Verbobonc to clear their debts by getting rid of their absurdly large book and do their general buying and selling in a large town instead of tiny Hommlet.

The walk there was mostly uneventful, though they did come across a group of traders and peasants making the trek out to Hommlet, until the third day. On that day, near dusk, they saw dust in the distance and wisely decided to get off the road and onto a nearby hillock.

No sooner had they accomplished this than the dust resolved itself into twenty-odd horsemen. From the road these horsemen claimed to be collecting a toll for use of the road in the name of on Lord Diego. Pretty much everyone in the party thought this was a ruse, and a poor one at that, since the admittedly well-equipped men didn't bother with any standards or devices other than a red armband.

After several tense minutes which involved two of the "men-at-arms" entering the camp while leaving the other eighteen on the road in a show of goodwill, Volbak, who has taken on the role of party leader, decided to let them take their tithe and go. Which they did, claiming a pair of crystal goblets and a fine broadsword "for the safe use of the road through the territory of Lord Diego, rightful ruler of these lands."

They reached Verbobonc without further incident.

In Verbobonc was a bit of accounting and a bit of rumourmongering to the effect that the eastern reaches are again becoming unsafe unless you travel in large groups - though not everyone in the city believes that. Notable expenditures included Isildel learning Create Fire after the fiasco with the green slime and the hiring on of a porter by the party, a shield-bearer by Isildel to cover him while casting spells, and a healer by Calowas. Despite groaning over the cost, they chose to pay all three the monthly rate.


In addition, Calowas got an audience with one of the Duke's chancellors and informed the man about the band claiming to be working for a Lord Diego. That got a serious frown and a "we'll send some people to look into it" to which Calowas responded, "We'd be happy to be those people" and the chancellor responded, "No, I think we'll send some soldiers to look into it." Bandit lords claiming territory out from under the rightful duke is nothing to sniff at.

On the way back, the trip out through the populated lands was marked only by the occasional farmer using the road to travel to his neighboring village. However, once they reached the Kron hills, about three days out from Hommlet they were overtaken by a gnomish patrol. Relations with the gnomes were cordial to the point where they camped together and they got a chance to try some of the gnomish marching brew. It was potent stuff; so much so that the party isn't sure where Amalia ended up for the rest of the night.

From the gnomes they learned that there has been an increase in orcish and hobgoblin overland movements to dangerous levels. This very patrol had, four days previous, rousted two trolls from a relatively new den in the hills.


Oh, and did we mention the green dragon? But don't worry about that; it's hardly ever seen.



The next morning they set out and in another three days' time they made it to Hommlet, where the smell of smoke hung in the air, and that's where we stopped.

Notes

Don't ever leave a session report as long as I have for this one. I have a strangely good memory for details, but still, it's best to report on these things when they're fresh.

I never actually expected to get use out of my random encounter tables. Not only did I get use out of them, but we actually had a whole session based around them, and they created a plot to boot. Furthermore, with the exception of the accounting in the middle, I'm fairly sure all of the players were engaged and interested in the game. Goes to show that random encounters overland aren't the same thing as random encounters in the dungeon.

Speaking of accounting, does anyone have any tips for making that go as quickly as possible other than do it all between sessions? Sometimes that's not feasible, since I can't end each session back in town.

In which elves steal, dwarves are hairless and I'm sorely tempted to use horde pygmies: After play 4

I have some catching up to do due to my hiatus. Fortunately, today at work everyone left me alone so I could get my actual work done. And now I'm home at a reasonable hour. Yay!

Cast:
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

Calowas' player couldn't make it tonight. Since I don't have the luxury of having each session be a different trip into the dungeon, but I don't want hangers-on, the first thing that happened during the session was that an urchin-boy came running into the moathouse, exhausted and dirty, and handed Calowas a card. "Oh no!" Calowas moaned, "I"m late for the Thieves' Union meeting!" and he ran off into the wilderness, putatively back to Hommlet to attend at the local chapterhouse. (Obviously, they're an outpost from Nulb.)

Anyway, the party was nearly done with the top floor of the moathouse; there was some discussion as to whether it was worth finishing the place off, or if they should just try the door they found earlier that led downstairs. After not too much discussion, Volbak took the lead and opened the last door...onto a very moldy kitchen. It was obvious that this place hadn't been cared for for ages.

There was some interest in the mold from the usual suspect, but it turned out both to be not magical nor particularly hallucinogenic, so interest was quickly lost after Volbak took a salutary essay into the kitchen to look for something of value - old cutlery, pots, or something. No luck, but then, they didn't want to stick around to search. I can't say I blame them; the place reeked something awful.

That accomplished, they headed down the stairs, where it quickly became clear that the door had swollen shut due to long exposure to moisture. (The moathouse is in a swamp, after all.) With much banging (and a little hinge-oiling) they finally managed to slam the door open, whereupon Volbak stumbled through the arch...and some green goop fell on him.

Let me say here that I run green slime nasty. The AD&D Monster Manual states that in 1-4 melee rounds you're basically screwed, sorry, that's it. I ran this as 4d cor per turn until you die, and non-sealed armor protects for two turns as it seeps in. (I think in future, if there is future, I'll run it as 2d, but after 1d6 rounds the only way to make it stop is with a Cure Disease and Remove Curse.)

Volbak quickly went down while the party tried to figure out what to do. Isildel tried apporting it off, and got some, but it quickly grew to replace the lost mass. A quick Naturalist roll told them this stuff is vulnerable to fire, and they had ten gallons of lamp oil, but they were using Continual Light for a light source, and the wizard didn't have Ignite Fire...

Turns out, though, that he did have a lit rope. (It's his Signature Item; we discussed this beforehand and I okayed him having a 'comestible' Signature Item, simulating the fact that he always has some around.) So, with a splash of lamp oil (taking 1d6 seconds) and the application of an open flame (taking 2 seconds), the slime-covered dwarf went up like an effigy of Guy Fawkes, still making his various HT rolls to stay alive while the cleric, Amalia, poured holy energy into him as fast as she could.

After the slime was gone, the barbarian tackled him to the ground to put out the fire - and discovered the second dollop of green slime over the archway. Fortunately, the party was prepared, and Chief just lost her hauberk and gained a few scorchmarks.

That was enough of that. The party decided discretion was the better part of valor and carted off their severely wounded comrades back to Hommlet, where Canon Terjon (standing in for the absent Canoness Ydey) agreed to care for the wounded dwarf for a suitable donation to the Church.

The party spent the week in town. Unfortunately they didn't hear much they didn't already know, mostly because Hommlet is not the place to go if you want news. However, they did contact their debtors in Verbobonc, the local Wizard's Society, and they learned that they could erase their debts from underwriting the expedition by returning the book they had found. After their comrade was recovered, they returned to the Moathouse, determined to get at least something out of this debacle by claiming the Manual of the Sea. So, they rented a draft horse and a wagon, and they apported the huge chunk of valuable stone out of the Moathouse and onto the wagon. 

While they were dragging the book back, when they passed Burne's castle-in-progress, they were summoned to meet him by a page. Turns out, unsurprisingly, the local wizard is also interested in magical artifacts. While they couldn't come to an agreement (Burne was willing to offer a goodly amount of coin, but not quite enough to rid them of their debts), they did pawn off a few things they'd found in the Moathouse thus far, including a vial of pacified green slime.

======

From judging how things looked and sounded at the table, pretty much everyone had a good time.  I do badly need to work on my treasure document. At the moment I have it interspersed with the pages of the module, which works fairly well for linear treasure procurement, but doesn't work if someone has questions as to value or weight. I think instead I'm just going to have two folders - one with the module and monster/trap stats interleaved, and the other with treasure, for easy reference.

Also, I need to put together an Excel doc to keep track of treasure weight, so I can watch that appropriately. Best of all would be if each of the players had one, so they could track weight in real-time, but that might be asking for too much accounting at the table. I'm not sure how fun that would be for them.

Finally, I was glad that my post on portage for Dungeon Fantasy got some play. They needed to rent a horse and wagon. I knew how much that would cost, and I knew how much horse they would need, with a simple lookup.

Honey I shrunk the PCs: After play report 3

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

Last session ended with the ignominous death of my beloved bandits. (Actually brigands - there is a difference.) The thief, undeterred by his wounds, immediately set about casing their quarters, finding some small change, a few rations, and the Manual of the Sea, a manual of Shiphandling written by the mad Dwarf Durgin Ulubad. It's quite ornate, quite magical, quite valuable (the letters are inlaid aquamarines!) and also 1,400 lbs - the pages are slabs of stone. Yep. This was actually the slab that Calawas was tossed onto for later interrogation in the last session - the book protector is just light enough that the Barbarian could move it without herniating himself.

Cue appropriate amounts of dickering about treasure, spurred on when the party found silver and even a bit of gold on the bodies of their enemies. (I'm using the bog-standard DF values for copper, silver, and gold, which makes gold very valuable.)

Funnily enough, the thief and the scout (who were, for pretty much the whole session, in single-digit HP range - more on this later) were stuck in the bandit hole-up when this noise attracted a swarm of dire rats from the pantry. Things were looking a bit sticky, because your typical ROUS brings friends, until the resident Problem Solv-err, I mean wizard Glued them to the floor. Let's see: rats with ST 9 need to make a ST-5 check to move one hex, then do it again to move another...nope. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Or rats in a trap. Still, this stirred up the indigenous wildlife a tad, so that after folks were done looting the bodies, things had been riled up.

Rather than waiting for healing, Calawas hobbled ahead, going down the southern corridor to check out - oh, hey, wait, is that a bloated decomposing body? Awesome! Does it have any stuff? What? No? Sure it does! Let me squish around in it a bit!

And that's how he didn't notice the Huge Fierce Green Snake Barring the Way! -I mean, curled up in the corner. Or rather, shortly afterward he did, after it missed him. Cue hijinks that involved setting a corner of the moathouse on fire, the already half-dead thief getting poisoned and narrowly escaping with his life thanks to the attentions of the party cleric and the barbarian not killing everyone simply because the wizard prepared Sleep that day. (As noted before, Berserk and Sense of Duty to Adventuring companions creates some powerful synergy for DF.)

Well, that's all well and good - off to the nearby room! What's in here?

At the same time, the scout and wizard, who had wanted to go down the other hallway, get ambushed by a tick. Yes, not that impressive, though it was the size of a human head. More of a freakish annoyance than anything else. After that, there was serious talk of going home - it was around 1900 game time - or at least resting. They eventually decided to clear out one of the rooms, bring the horses into the Great Hall, and post a watch, hoping for the best. Well, what do you know, the best happened - they weren't molested in the slightest, despite the swamp being thick with prowling wildlife. Good thing, too, because the cleric is their only source of healing, and she's beginning to feel stretched. Part of that is that she didn't even focus on healing so much as being a "divine caster" - i.e. the one who deals with undead and other icky stuff.

Afterward they tossed more rooms, finding a few pieces of worthwhile treasure but not much. They finally approached the last room, having already found the stairs and cordoned them off for later exploration, and discovered that the room was an old barracks with a giant lizard. Well, that was easy. The barbarian and the knight took care of him, and we broke there. I fully anticipate the thief going through its guts and trying to swallow anything he finds.

===========

Okay, so I'm coming to realize that I need to help rein in Calawas' player. He likes the limelight, and most of the time other people enjoy him having it up to a point, because he's a good actor and a funny guy. However, other people need to be able and allowed to do things. I need to work on including them.

Also, I need to work on presenting random encounters in a better way. The Moathouse is especially egregious, what with wandering nasty wildlife and ghouls and so on, to the point where there were a few jokes about Gygaxian ecology and spontaneous generation. I think this will die down as the random encounters make more sense, i.e. are more able to be rationally integrated into the backdrop. However, we'll see. It's still an area to work on.

The party badly needs a leader. This is related to the first issue, but the whole session was effectively them flailing around - getting things done, certainly, but mostly because everyone was rescuing the thief when he went off and did stupid stuff on his own. It's in some way self-correcting; if he keeps wandering off alone while bleeding out and barely able to move, something will eat him. As it is, he only survived because I drew the interior of the Moathouse two sizes too small.

Finally, the Manual of the Sea really makes me happy. It's quite valuable, but also quite heavy, and a little crazy to boot. It presents a conundrum to the players and is also the reward to that conundrum. There was talk of clearing out the Moathouse and setting up a museum, even. And it's all thanks to the random tables in Dungeon Fantasy 8

Into the Moathouse: After play report 2

Wow, it's been far too long here. Explanations are in order: first I lost my car to a roadside glacier (because it was better to hit that than the schoolbus), and then my wife got sick. With work ticking up on top of that, I simply haven't had time to do justice to this blog.

Hopefully now that I have a new car and my wife is on the mend, we can return to a normal posting schedule.

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine) Player absent, character present

We had our second session last night. I'm quickly learning the virtues of preparation beforehand; I didn't have much chance to prep anything new or even look at my old stuff, so this was successful only because I had previously done a lot of thinking about what the entrance to the Moathouse would be like.

Last session ended in the middle of combat with the frogs outside, with Lamaevhun in bad condition in the belly of a frog. At the same time, Calawas was charging into combat with a spear, barely keeping astride his ill-trained pony, looking set to go out in a blaze of glory.

Fortunately, Lamaevhun managed to wriggle his knife out while inside the belly of the beast. With his strong right arm, he quickly dispatched the beast and got down to the messy business of cutting himself an exit.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party marshalled well, cutting the frogs to shreds in short order. They even managed to avoid losing their horses, due to some amazing rolls on my part for horse morale. (Basically, I was having them make Fright Checks every other round - and they all passed. Every single one.)

Frogs dispatched, they fairly quickly decided to butcher and cook them. French cuisine is, after all, appreciated by all delvers, even the most uncultured. This was fortuitous for more than rations, though, as in the belly of the largest frog they also found a one-caret amethyst, in finest Gygaxian tradition. (How you find a rock about the size of a pea in the guts of a frog the size of a horse, I don't know. I don't question these things.)

Little did they know at the time that there was a pair of bandits watching them despatch the frogs, and then periodically poking their heads back out to see what the ruckus was about. So, when Calawas got bored and wandered into the Moathouse courtyard to poke about, he was shot several times and silenced before he could get a sound out. The bandits thereupon dragged him back to their hideout for questioning, to get the exact disposition of the forces outside, purpose, etc. (At this point, Katz, the guy who plays Calawas, started playing the barbarian instead, who is normally played by my wife. She was home sick.)

Fortunately for Calawas, the Lamaevhun noticed his absence not too long after he left, and Ilsildel even thought he heard a scuffle of chain against stone in a lull in the conversation. (I called for Perception checks; Ilsildel made his by six.)

In short order the party hobbled the horses, banked the fire, and went to take a look. The bandits for their part were mostly prepared, figuring the party would come in after their comrade.

For those of you who don't know or don't remember the first floor of the moathouse, the courtyard doubles as an abbatoir. The walls are pierced by murder holes, and the only entrance to the inner keep is up a small set of stairs and through a set of stout double doors. However, the bandits didn't have enough men (only eight) to take full advantage, and the doors are in bad disrepair, one completely off and the other only holding on by one rusty hinge. So when the party entered the courtyard, they bided their time until the party was close enough, at which point the four with crossbows let fly while four others set up a two-man deep blockade on the stairs.

They missed, causing the Ilsildel and Lamaevhun to drop to the ground. Neither of them care. Hooray for Heroic Archer. Also, they failed to consider the effect a raging barbarian with a Reach 2 weapon would have on their formation. Oh, and with someone behind you it's very difficult to retreat for +1/+3 to defenses. What should have been an easy victory for the bandits quickly turned into a slaughter, and then a rout. The bandit leader called for terms after Lamaevhun dropped one of the front line with an arrow, and Volbak split his head open like a melon.

Terms were accepted...sort of. Volbak made his roll to check his Bloodlust, but our barbarian didn't snap out of the berserker rage, which led to the line of the night:

Volbak, stepping up after a wounded bandit who has already dropped his weapon and is stepping back out of combat: "You realize she isn't going to stop." With Jim's delivery in a Nolan-esque Batman voice, it was very scary, especially if you were a bandit.

At that point it was every man for himself. Lamaevhun and Ilsildel worked together to light up the great hall with an arrow, and Amalia put a Sunbolt through the leader's shoulderblades for max damage, earning her first kill. Shortly thereafter they patched together one of the footmen and found Calawas, alive and hastily bandaged, tied up and slung onto a large block of stone.

We ended there, because it was ten o'clock. Everyone earned five character points (the first milestone being penetration into the moathouse and dealing with the bandits). Volbak earned the MVP point for 1) being awesome on the front line, and 2) having the best quote. Next session will start with finding and divvying up the loot, then deciding whether or not they want to go back to town.

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Notes:

The players have taken fairly well to me giving tactical suggestions. It both speeds along the fight and makes them more effective. At the same time, I've put in an effort to have more narrative flair. I feel it's pretty weak so far, but with time and practice I'll get better and more comfortable again.

One thing about the barbarian: I realized about halfway through the session that I'd brought the wrong character sheet. Instead, I had a higher-powered one (by 25 points) that had a maul instead of a mace. Normally, being 150 points, he wouldn't have enough strength to attack every round with a mace. I let it slide for this session though, because it was awesome. However, had he been played correctly, the bandits would have been much tougher opponents.

We got through one and a half fights in three hours, shoving in a fifteen minute break and some roleplaying/logistical discussion in between. It's a pretty good pace. I think it's helped along by a) me getting more comfortable with the capabilities of my NPCs, b) help provided by me and one of the players on tactical decisions, and c) an interest in fast play instead of strict rules-correctness.

I made a mistake in the mapping of the Moathouse: rather than remembering that the squares on the map are actually 10' squares, I went with 5' squares in my transposition to hexes. This means the moathouse is about 2/3rds the size it should be. (5' = 2 hexes, and 10' = 3 hexes, or close enough for government work.) Whoops. Maybe I need to take the maps, blow them up, and put them on hexes, but that seems like a lot of work. Either way, the first and second floors won't line up, if anyone cares.

I need to figure out what to do with players when their characters get killed. Fortunately, in this instance, there was another PC to jump into. However, generally speaking between sessions I want PCs to drop out (stay at camp, feel sick, whatever) when their players aren't about. The party so far has refused to hire on help; should I give them some hirelings who usually stay with the horses anyway? I'm not sure. One thing I know I don't want is for someone to have to just sit there and watch everyone else.

In Which Hommlet is Left Surprisingly Intact: After play report 1

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

Our intrepid group of adventurers made it down the road from Verbobonc to see the little village on a hill with its strange new Church, bringing only some little gear and their travel-worn ponies. They came originally from a sylvan community on the shores of the Nyr Dyv, being a sort of extended family that was sent out "to make something of themselves" and, perhaps more importantly, to stop being near home. (The dwarf was adopted because his parents have strange ideas about the origins of the species; nobody's had the heart to tell him yet.)

They came with a decent amount of debt underwriting their expedition from the purser's Guild in Verbobonc, and so were quite interested in employment, and fast. (The pursers are known both for their usurious rates and for their legbreakers.)

Riding past the Church, their druid (not pictured above) spotted the standing stones of Jaroo's grove in the distance and set off in a beeline to, "Contemplate the inner mysteries of nature," over the wizard's objections that, "You can do that here, dude! I brought, like, fifty feet of rope!"

Instead of messing around in the town, they made a beeline for the Inn of the Welcome Wench, hoping to find lodging and, well, some wenches. What they found instead was more expenses, but Master Gundigroot was kind enough to put them up for the night with a basic meal in exchange for the party wizard making all of his lighting require no oil for the next week or so. During their copious conversation on the nature of the fare and serving staff, Lamaevhun and Isildel shared this gem:

"Dude, try the turnips, they have awesome turnips."
"I prefer the stuff I can kill myself."
"Dude, you can kill turnips! Can't you hear their screams when they bite into you?"

This went on for a bit, until the traders entered the establishment and managed to garner instant dislike from Calawas. Nevertheless, after a bit of verbal sparring, it was made clear to the greedy little bug- I mean, the party thief, that a chance for coin was afoot, so they repaired to the trading post for a bit of more private conversation.

It seems that Lareth is the leader of a band of ruffians that Gremag is convinced is harming business. After some wrangling the PCs secured the right to keep anything they find (of course!) and even a pouch of a hundred copper, which elicited quite the interest from Calawas when Rannos, the slow stupid one, went to open the safe. Also, they completely blew off the offer of a man-at-arms to go with them for only $15 a day.


After that, they decided to retire. Early and fresh next morning (at about ten o'clock, after getting rid of hangovers and having breakfast), they set off for the half-day's journey to the old moathouse everyone had been telling them about, passing by Burne's construction with only a few glances and leaving the druid behind to his contemplations.

It all went well and I read some box text (we're enjoying the box text), until they came upon a pool that the scout discovered was home to a colony of voracious monstrous frogs! He got off a shot, but then was quickly snared and swallowed, discovering that the larger ones had teeth. This caused Chief (an otherwise unassuming individual who has both Berserk and Sense of Duty (Fellow Adventurers)) to go a little crazy and start playing golf, smacking one of the dog-sized frogs straight into the side of the moathouse. The rest of the party dithered and got ready while the horses miraculously stayed their ground, sealing the scout's doom. (He was around seven hexes ahead, which was great for the rest of the party, but very bad for him when he missed his perception roll. Also, we discovered that our dwarven knight has a move of 2 with encumbrance. Whoops.)

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Notes:

1. Three hours is enough time to do some roleplaying, but not enough for serious dungeon delving it seems. I should probably be prepared to stop in the middle of combat pretty much always.
2. They didn't have a lot of interest in intrigue in Hommlet. I'm okay with this. They willfully stumbled into the one truly interesting thing going on, and none of the module requires that they care about Hommlet in the least.
3. My players are prone to distraction. I knew this before; our last GM (the guy now playing the scout, poor man) basically had us run riot over his campaign with some nights where we didn't even play but fifteen minutes or so. Fortunately, they also respond well to direction. I don't want or need to be tyrannical, since half the joy of this group is getting together to talk about stuff, but they're attentive when I take the reins to get back to the game.
4. I need to brush up on GURPS combat a little from a GM side. I know the rules, but it's been a while, so I have some trouble remembering to apply them all at times. There were definitely a couple moments where the frogs did some things they oughtn't be able to. Also, I need to firm up their stats a bit to deal with corner cases.
5. I badly need to teach my players how to play, or they're all going to die. For example, our scout had a full second to himself to react to these frogs. He knows also that he's out in front, a goodly number of yards away from help. So what does he do? He shoots one frog once in the torso. With skill 16 and 5 yards away, without help coming, he should have at least gone for the vitals, or (if standing still instead of doing a Move and Attack to retreat) maybe use 1 FP to shoot the vitals twice (Heroic Archer makes that a 10 or less, or 11 if you don't want to defend - low, but when faced with a bunch of enemies without backup, quantity has a quality all its own). None of this occurred to the player, though, nor to anyone else at the table. However, my work is predicated on the idea that the players know their options.