Sorcery! 2 - Magical Murder Mansion Part I

A rogues' gallery

As our campaign begins, our gallery of rouges are assembled in The Hanged Man, a tavern on the seedier side of Arkleton, Analand's capital.

As they waited for their prospective employer to arrive, our villains took to boasting about their latest exploits to each other.

Gearfrid, a merchant formerly from Ruddlestone, told of how he was framed by a noble and thrown into prison, but through his skills at manipulation managed to convince the guards to smuggle in some weapons for him. He armed a fellow prisoner by the name of Silent, who was then able to cut them their way out of the prison, leaving behind fifty dead prison guards.

Zul and Penn, halfling highwaymen, boasted about the rich haul they got from waylaying another noble's caravan.

Zhora, an elven necromancer, spoke of how she and her dwarven bodyguard Zamm were hired by a baron to slay a rival, whom she then animated as an undead and made march back to her employer to collect her pay.

(At this point I was worried that Analand was running out of barons and the letter Z.)

Malus the minstrel then spoke of how he sowed discord and plague among the inhabitants of a city, causing strife and countless deaths, not for silver, but for his pleasure. His companion, the quiet druid named Horovar, merely grunted.

Then just as the sun was setting, a hooded man, calling himself only 'V', came to their table, and told them that the Grand Wizard Goncol had died in "an accident", and that he wished them to retrieve a scroll from the vault in his mansion, before the place would be occupied by the king's men.

V offered each pair of our villains 150 gold pieces for retrieving the scroll, and an offer for two other jobs afterwards if they succeeded, promising a total of 500 gold pieces for each duo upon completion of all three jobs.

Our villains took the contract, and set off to gather information on their target.

By speaking to former students of Goncol's school, suppliers of his food and magical components, and dwarven masons who built his tower, they were able to ascertain the layout of the mansion, the adjoining tower and its vault, and that Goncol most likely lived alone, and had in the past procured various alchemical supplies, as well as clockwork mechanisms.

Armed with this information, Silent, Penn, Zhora, and Horovar set off for the mansion, arriving a little after midnight.

Here they found that the compound was divided into two parts: a mansion to the front, and a tower in the rear, the latter surrounded by a hedge maze.

The party attempted to enter the tower through the hedges, but Horovar reported that the hedges were strangling vines from the Forest of Snatta, and that hacking through them would be too dangerous.

The party then entered the compound by the front gate, and found a plaque upon the door of the mansion with the following lines:

If you seek to enter my tower, first find ye two keys of power.

One lies behind my greatest treasure, source of my pride, my joy, my pleasure.

The other lies in plain sight, unhidden; but woe to he who takes it unbidden.

If you wish to enter my vault, two more keys you will need by default.

Where the first is, is crystal clear, but reach for it, and it will cost you dear.

The other is not found upon this Earth, to find it you must return to my birth.

Venture into the mansion of Goncol, and you will find out I am quite the 

Wary of entering through the front doors, the party pried open a pane of glass on the window to the dining hall, and Penn the halfling climbed through, and opened the door from inside. In the main lobby they found four bronze statues depicting Goncol himself, the Arch-sorcereress Morgana, a warrior named Valerian, and an elven warrior named Glowulf. When they wondered aloud whether the statues would animate and attack them, the statues started to speak, denying that they would do so; and true to their words, they did not. The party questioned the statues, but they could provide little information.

The party then searched through the rooms in the mansion, encountering a few magical traps, but no opposition, and found various minor magical items, such as an egg-cup that cooked eggs to perfection, a wand of fruit transmutation, a salt cellar that held ten times its volume in salt, a glow globe, a couple of magical pillows, and a couple of clockwork artifacts: a musical box in the shape of a nightingale, and an alarm clock in the shape of a rooster.

Inside Goncol's bedroom, they found the Grand Wizard lying in his bed. Horovar struck at the form with his sword, only to find that it was an illusion. They searched the room, and Silent found the first key, a small golden one, in an alcove hidden behind a nude portrait of Goncol himself.

The party descended to the cellar, and found a hidden door to an underground prison. Within one of the cells was a man who looked like the statue named Valerian. The man claimed to have lost his memory from the tortures inflicted upon him by Goncol, and begged the party to release him. After some deliberation, our villains decided to do so, gave him some of the loot they had taken so far to carry, and took him outside the mansion... whereupon he bolted for the front gate. Penn reacted swiftly and put two arrows into the man's back before he could reach the gate. As he fell to the ground, dying, his form changed to that of a hideous, tentacled humanoid. Horovar moved to where he fell, but could not bring himself to deliver a killing blow - but the creature expired soon after.

Unable to locate a second key, the party decided to go into the hedge maze instead. Entering the garden that led to the maze, they found a fountain, and lying within it was a second golden key. Horovar used his sword to gently fish the key out, but as the key broke the surface of the water, the water began to move and take a humanoid form...

Prepping and Running the Game

The basis for this session is Magical Murder Mansion by Skerples.

I had originally envisioned the campaign to be three assassination missions, each of which would take place in a different environment. I thought that Morgana would be encountered in her Sorceress' Tower, and Goncol in his mansion, and so I searched for modules set in mansions, and came upon this module. In the module the occupant of the titular mansion was dead, and I thought I could work that into my storyline too.

The actual mansion in the module is much larger and had more parts to it, but I wanted a much shorter session and thus had to cut the number of rooms down. I went through the module, noted the encounters which I thought were funny or interesting, and then placed them into the rooms in the Heroic Maps mansion map which I bought a while back.

I then added minor magical items from a table in Knock #1 to locations which they would fit in. This encouraged the players to search the place, and also placed some pressure on them, as we tracked encumbrance for this game.

Then, in the finest tradition of funhouse dungeons, I composed a poem to let give the players know that they had to find keys to complete the mission, and also clues as to where they might be found.

The players were rather cautious in the first part of the game, no doubt due to their experience in our last campaign, where every room was either guarded by undead or animated statues or golems, or trapped. The four statues were of course for comic relief, but also played an important role for the whole campaign as they would allow our characters to recognise the four members of the party from the previous campaign.

They also spent time searching for loot, and trying to figure out what each magical item did. There was no real combat this session - the only time we drew cards for initiative was when the creature tried to run away, and Penn shot it... because he was carrying some of their loot. Ironically, when Horovar moved in to try to crush the creature's head with the bear trap he had, the player rolled 3 successes on him empathy check on 3 dice - you have to *fail* an empathy check to deliver a coup de grace.

The party had spent a lot of in-game time just acquiring one key, leaving them 2 or 3 hours to enter the vault and find the scroll before daybreak and the king's men would move in. There will be a couple of combats in the next game, so we will find out how fast and interesting the combat system in Forbidden Lands is.

Musings on Gaming #6.1 - Power

When the newbie GM picks up his d20 for the first time

Last week I got into a discussion on an RPG forum on the topic of Game Balance. The thread ran to more than two hundred posts, due mainly to people arguing about definitions, and people chiming in to agree with one point of view or another.

The points of view ranged from "balance is impossible and unnecessary in RPGs" from one end, to "balance is possible and desirable for an enjoyable game for everyone" on the other.

When we talk about balance in an RPG, we are usually talking about two separate things: power balance between player characters/classes, and balancing encounters.

Here it is probably worthwhile noting that the concept of balance is one that is inherited from RPGs' predecessor wargaming. Modern commercial wargames almost all have army lists and points system aimed at providing a "balanced" or fair fight between opponents. Within an army list, the troop types are supposed to be costed according to how well they can perform in a battle, taking into account their speed, their ability to deal damage at a distance and in melee, as well as how long they can be expected to survive in the game. Between army lists, a unit costing 10 points is supposed to be worth as much as a unit costing 10 points from the other list.

Of course we all know that points systems are imperfect, and how useful a unit is is greatly dependent on the tactical situation: a missile unit is likely to be less useful if there are lots of line-of-sight blocking terrain, and a fast-moving unit is less useful when there are lots of bad-going terrain, and so on.

Now when we port this idea of points and balance over to RPG, the situation becomes more complicated.

While wargames deal with the limited aspect of combat, characters in an RPG deal with more types of situation, typically exploration and social interaction. How important each of those aspects are depends greatly on what type of game the characters are in: in a combat-heavy game they may matter little, while in a mystery-solving type of game they become crucial. For this reason, balancing the abilities and capabilities of player characters/classes become more difficult, as a lot depends on the context.

That said, it does not mean that the rules cannot try to achieve some sort of "balance". And the way to do this, ironically, is not to make all player classes "balanced" in that they can all do everything equally well, but to make them "imbalanced", in that some classes are better at some things, while others are better at other. In other words, we need "niche protection".

I personally believe that when people complain about imbalance between the character classes, they are not so much complaining about how certain classes cannot put out the same amount of hit point damage per round at the same level at another class as they are complaining about feeling that their character isn't contributing to the success of the party as much as they wished. A typical rouge character is not going to be able to put out as much damage as a fighter of the same level in a stand-up fight, so it is no wonder that a rouge player often wants his character to go off on his own to 'scout ahead' or flank the enemy forces, even if it means splitting the party.

We all play RPGs because we want to see our characters do what we expect them to do, whether it is a fighter putting out lots of hurt on bad guys, a ranger tracking enemies down, a rouge executing a perfect backstab, a wizard casting fireball, or a bard being just plain annoying.

If a particular class is better at doing all these things, like the dreaded DMPC, then there is no reason for players to play any of the other classes. Likewise, if all classes are equally good at everything, then it doesn't make a difference which class the players choose to play. At the end of the day, RPGs are games, and games require making choices that lead to meaningful differences in outcomes, and for the choice on what class to play to be meaningful, we need to have niche protection.

Of course, having niche protection alone is not enough; if a game is heavy on investigation and diplomacy and light on combat, then players who are playing the martial classes will feel like they have little to contribute. It is therefore up to the GM to plan or create encounters where all players can contribute to the progress of the party. Now it may be difficult to do so for every scenario or session, but over the course of a campaign, we can hopefully let each and every player have the chance to make his character shine and create memorable moments.

In the second part of this post I will talk about the other aspect of balance: balancing encounters.

Sorcery! 2 - The Sequel Campaign

This week, my players and I started a new campaign which is a spin-off/sequel to the Sorcery! campaign we played two years ago.

The seed for this campaign was planted at the very session of the finale of the previous campaign, after we briefly described what happened to each of the characters, and a player suggested an "evil" campaign where they play, well, evil characters. We liked the idea so much we decided to plan a slot for this campaign, but due to COVID, we had to wait until now to put it into action.

While the basic plot for the campaign came to me that very night, it took a while before I decided on what rules to use. The Advanced Fighting Fantasy rules we used for the first campaign was too simplistic for me. I wanted something with a little more crunch.

Eventually I settled on the Forbidden Lands rules, which FG had backed in one of their later kickstarters. While I think the fluff for FL is silly, their combat rules are rather interesting, and the mechanic for "pushing a roll" gives that risky, desperado feel that I think fits an evil campaign.

With that, I present you the prologue to our second Sorcery! campaign:

It is twenty years since the Crown of Kings left passed from Analand to Ruddlestone. Few know the secret that while in Analand's care, the crown was stolen by the Archmage of Mampang, and it was only through the efforts of a small band of heroes that it was retrieved before its loss was known - something which would have brought disgrace to the royal house.

In those two decades, Analand has changed, as had our heroes. 

A new king now sits upon the throne, young, and yet untried. Since the crown left, the fortunes of the kingdom has declined. Corrupt officials now sit in high offices. Criminals terrorise the countryside, and the streets of the cities, even of Arkleton, the capital, are no longer safe after sunset.

Goncol, the thief from Khare, having gained a mansion as his reward for his part in recovering the crown, opened up a school of wizardry. After an initial period of success, the school became plagued with scandals, and soon had to close down. It was said that Goncol conducted unholy experiments in the dungeons of his mansion, and one of his subject was Valerian, the former captain of the Royal Guard sent on the same mission with him, but who turned against his king and swore fealty to the Archmage of Mampang instead. Rumour has it that Valerian, broken by the horrendous experiments done on him, eventually managed to escape from the dungeon. It is not known if he had help from the staff in the mansion, but Goncol became paranoid, and gradually dismissed all of them, choosing instead magical servants, and putting his trust in traps and magical guardians to keep himself safe from any revenge by Valerian.

Morgana the Sorceress received for her service a tower in the hills, which she fortified with many magical wards and a small army of loyal guards. She rose in the hierarchy of the College of Sorcerers in Arkelton, eventually becoming the Arch-Sorceress. But once she had attained that title, she took little interest in that job, leaving most of the duties of the position to the deans of the college, and spending most of her time in her fortress.

Little is known of what happened to the last member of the party, the Black Elf Glowulf, who was said to have asked for a modest reward, and thereafter returned to his village and became a simple fisherman.

Now, the people of Analand wait anxiously for the return of the crown of kings to the land, hoping that it will bring a new golden age to the kingdom.

In a dark tavern in Arkleton, the new heroes - nay, villains - of our tale also wait for their contact, for it seems that someone had brought together the most notorious criminals of the city, for some nefarious purpose...

Cast of Villains

Zhora, Elven Death Sorcerer. Once an orphan who lived on the streets of Arkleton, her destiny changed when she found a strange skull staff that awakened her magical talents. Her companion is Zamm, a dwarven warrior, trained to be a bodyguard to a noble, but now protects the necromancer.

Gearfried, a trader from Ruddlestone, ran a successful business in Analand, until he was framed by a nobleman and thrown into prison. Here, he befriended Silent, the assassin, and together they escaped and started their life of crime.

Malus, the flamboyant minstrel, a homicidal psychopath, who travels with Horovar, a Druid from foreign lands who had come to Analand for his own unknown goal.

Zul the Sorcerer, and Penn the Hunter, a pair of halfling highwaymen.

Musings on Gaming #5 - Mind

Photo of a GM removing agency from a player, 2019 (colourised)

As I mentioned in the last post in this series, I had a couple of realisations that changed the way I look at GMing around 2008. One of them came from the Dragon Age RPG, which had a section on character motivations and goals.

Now I always knew that players had motivations and goals: they wanted to gain experience, gold, cool magical items, and occasionally they wanted a custom-made character class, and they would come to me with these requests, and we would work something out. They may have different reasons for joining my game, but they all wanted to play and have fun, which was good.

What we didn't really pay a lot of attention to, however, was the motivation for their characters. Once in a while in a longer campaign a player would say: since my character is a noble/knight, I think he would like to go on a quest to win a tourney/slay a dragon. This was something which evolved in playing, and not something which we consciously tried to impose. The lack of motivation wasn't a problem when we were younger - we all had a lot of free time and we weren't really expecting the games to be anything other than a platform where we would live out our power fantasy, kill monsters and take their stuff, and just hang around and crack jokes. But as I got older and they way I viewed the world changed, I began to find that less satisfying.

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I like my game worlds to be real, and people in the real world have goals and motivations, so why shouldn't the PCs?

I now ask my players to think about their characters' short- and long-term goals when they create their characters. This not only makes them think about their characters and how they will interact with the central tension of the game world, but also allows me to plan the campaign in such a way that most if not all the characters will have a chance to fulfill both their short- and long-term goals.

Goals and motivations also of course apply to NPCs, from the throw-away peasant the PCs meet the road, to the main villain of the campaign, and every monster and minion in between. And here is where the difference between motivation and goals become important: motivation is what drives us, it is, ironically, the end; goals, on the other hand, are what we think will help us achieve the end, it is, again ironically, the means.

Goals are as varied as they come: the big bad wants to get his hands on the magical artifact so he can rule the world; the evil corporation wants to steal the data from their competitor so they can make big bucks; the cultists want to summon Cthulhu because... er...

And this is where I find the motivations of many classic villains as being unrealistic. What, for example, is Sauron's motivation? Or Emperor Palpatine's? It is perhaps OK for the villain of a fantasy novel or a sci-fi movie to have no other motivation other than being evil and wanting to rule the world, but in our own world, no villain works that way. No, not even real-life evil dictators who waged wars and murdered civilians. They may claim to do so based on some ideology or world view, but it is no coincidence that these villains also happened to live in luxury, protected by elite soldiers.

If watching The Godfather trilogy has taught me anything, it is that we all want the same things, but it is in how we try to achieve those things that make us good or evil.

Related to this is the idea of "evil races".

I can't remember when I stopped using the trope, but I did not stop because I believed that evil races in D&D represented real world races - I don't; rather, it was the realisation that any sentient race cannot be all good or evil. If they cannot choose between good or evil acts, then they cannot be considered truly sentient; and any creature that displays the level of intelligence demonstrated by the "demi-humans" in D&D must possess self-awareness and sentience.

Evil must be a choice, or else it has no meaning.

Certainly certain cultures may find certain practices acceptable which our own do not, but oftentimes whether we find something evil or not has more to do with how different they are from we do, and whether it hurts our interests. Some "villains" in my campaigns are not fully sentient beings, but forces of nature or manifestation/personification of the principle of destruction, like the Grens (*not-aliens*) in our sci-fi campaign, or the Darkspawn in the Dragon Age setting. Such beings may make it easier for players and GMs because they serve as a non-sentient enemy which is unambiguously a threat to our own existence, and can therefore be destroyed without qualms; but it is worth noting that in both the Alien/s franchise and the original Dragon Age computer game, while the "monsters" of the stories cause fear, it is the willingness of people to sacrifice others to these monsters for their own gains that causes revulsion in the viewers.

Five Torches Deep in Barrowmaze - a retrospective

This is not a review of the Five Torches Deep rules, or the Barrowmaze module, but more my reflection on running a megadungeon using an OSR set of rules.

Barrowmaze was the first true megadungeon I ran. I have previously runned large dungeons that took three or four sessions to play through, but these were always completed in single in-game days. Barrowmaze, however, is such a huge dungeon, with so many locations, that it is impossible for a party to explore all of it in a single day; the version of the dungeon which I ran is already a cut-down version of the original, with many monsters and treasures removed, plus I simplified the process for searching and looting the tombs, and it still took 17 sessions for my players to explore most of it.

While the first few sessions felt novel and different to my players - I am usually a GM who cares little about encumbrance and supplies like food and lamp oil - once they had to develop a system to investigate and loot tombs, things became more routine and mechanical later on in the campaign, and especially when the PCs gained more hit points and did not need to be as cautious as they did at levels 1 or 2. While this may seem rewarding to the players, from the point of view as the GM it was less interesting, as each encounter, while existing in the larger framework of a dungeon with a theme and a history, was essentially independent and isolated from the other encounters.

Also, with Five Torches Deep's system of "Schroedinger's supplies", bringing the exact supplies that you need in the exact quantities became less, well, exacting, and once the PCs have made enough gold this part of the gameplay was mostly auto-piloted. In practice, in-game passage of time and the availability of healing magic became the only determinants of how long the PCs could stay in the dungeon.

From a tactical point of a view, a megadungeon with a theme was fun. The players had to deal with traps which they knew had to be there, but the exact mechanism of which they did not know. The same was also true of monsters: they knew the dead would rise and attack them if they opened the sarcophagus or tried to remove grave goods from the burial niches, but they had to do those things if they wanted to get paid. However, these encounters mostly did not contribute to the narrative of the campaign. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially in an open-table system common in OSR and which we employed for my campaign, as it allows players to miss sessions and not feel like they cannot keep up with the storyline. But for me, at times it felt a little grind-y.

That is not to say that the Barrowmaze module did not encourage incorporating plotlines into the dungeon-delve. There are two major NPC factions operating in the dungeon, a few more "native" factions (which I ended up omitting), plus several NPC adventuring parties whom the PCs could have allied themselves with or competed against. In addition, several artefacts which were important either in opening certain doors or destroying the MacGuffin were littered throughout the module. The presence of these various parties, and the fact that the two main NPC parties had agendas which they were actively working towards meant that this was a megadungeon with a expiry date: eventually one of the factions will find the MacGuffin, and then things will get really bad for everyone else. This to me is a strong point for the design of the module, but it does require wisdom on the part of the GM on information management: let the players learn about the true purpose of the NPC factions too early, and they may become too focused on stopping them at the expense of exploring the dungeon; let them know too late, and things will just become a big showdown. In retrospect I should have given my players more information about the two NPC factions and perhaps having the PCs run into the NPCs more often, giving them more a sense that there is some constant scrabble for territory.

Over all I think the concept of Barrowmaze - a megadungeon with a reason for being what it is, populated by monsters with a reason for being inside, and being explored by several factions with competing interests - is a very good one. To fully exploit the potential of the set-up, however, requires a GM who knows what he wants out of the module, and how to achieve it.

The dungeon being as big as it is, PCs are expected to level up several times as they explore more and more of it, and this is something that I did not account for. In my other campaigns, I usually ask that my players keep track of things like gold and equipment earlier in the campaign, but when the PCs before richer and more experienced in adventuring, I tend to hand-wave these aspects. Usually, the scope of the adventure also shift from more low-level play like robbing tombs and fighting goblins, to higher-level missions like thwarting villains with devious plans and powerful henchmen. This becomes harder to implement in a megadungeon setting, or at least I feel I did not manage to make this transition.

So will I run another megadungeon again? Well, it was fun, but I will almost certainly not do so with this same group of players. The experience of starting as a level 1 tomb-robber and slowly working your way up to an experienced adventurer with lots of cool items is classic D&D, but I am not sure is one that players will enjoy going through again. Nevertheless, I don't rule out the possibility that I may run the module again for another group of players.

As for Five Torches Deep, there are many elements of the rules which I like and will incorporate into my standard, baseline 5E play, but I feel that the spell list is too limited and resulted magic-using PCs having the same repertoire of spells.

Overall it has been a learning experience for me as a GM, and if you are looking for a megadungeon to run, Barrowmaze is certainly worth looking at.

Chronicles of the Adventurers' Guild #17

This is the account I received from the companions of Tamira Reid, who on the 18th day of Ostar, in the year 1842, descended into the crypts beneath the Ashen Hills. I hereby record their names for posterity: Kimly of Forge, Leowe Blackclaw, also of Forge, Madian Moonridge, of the University in Greyhaven, and Moonshadow the Elf (see PC profiles here), with the orc Gamdar as their bearer.

Entering the crypts, the party came upon two dragon hybrid sentries, and by means of a beguiling spell were able to interrogate them and learn of their purpose: they had entered the crypts to seek out an undead dragon, animated by the Heart of Nodros, whom they called Ossirex, and whom they worshiped as a god. They had tricked a party of mercenaries to aid them in their quest, passing themselves off as tomb robbers, but had in fact been searching for the lair of this beast, until they were thwarted in their progress by the Cultists of Nodros. They had but recently found their way into the hall wherein Ossirex had been trapped; when the mercenaries saw the undead dragon, they realised that they had been deceived, but were forbidden to leave, and instead made to excavate a tunnel to the surface to free Ossirex, that he might appear before all the dragon hybrid and unite them.

The party then resolved to used subterfuge to lure the two other dragon hybrid in the cabal out of the lair, that they may be overcomed individually, but it seemed that the magic user among them were able to break the beguiling enchantment over their brethren, and they came silently upon our heroes and sought to ambush them. A melee ensued, during which three of the dragon hybrid were slain, and the orc Gamdar fled.

Calling upon the blessings of Kellos onto herself and her fellows, Tamira led the pursuit of the remaining villain, their leader, to the hall. There, she called out for the mercenaries to lay down their arms and leave, promising them safety and the mercy of Kellos if they did, and they did so, abandoning their former master.

Entering the hall, they did battle with the dragon hybrid and Ossirex, the great undead dragon. And although with his foul sorcery Ossirex was able to raise countless skeletal warriors to aid him, our heroes were able to overcome them with the grace of Kellos.

Tamira herself plucked the stone Heart of Nodros from the chest of Ossirex, but its evil burned her hands with a coldness. Now Kellos spoke to Tamira, and told her that the Heart must be destroyed with the mace of Druentes, which Tamira wielded, but the wielder would be killed in the act too.

Despite the beseeching of her companions, Tamira resolved to do so, ignoring their pleas, and so sacrificed herself for the good of all Terrinoth.

Her remains were faithfully gathered by Leowe Blackmane, who, stricken with grief, became a blasphemer of Kellos, blaming him for not returning Tamira to life.

So the tale was told to me by the companions of Tamira, and I did behold with mine own eyes the skull of Ossirex, which was terrible in aspect.

And it is thus that I beg our holy church to build upon this site a shrine honouring our late Sister in Kellos, that her deed and the grace of Kellos may be known to all who pass.

Brother Othar, Priest of Kellos

Prepping and Running the Game

The account above of the last session in our Barrowmaze campaign is mostly false, but what I imagine the PCs would have told Brother Othar upon their return to the guild, and how he would have recorded it.

The party did come upon the dragon hybrid sentries, and they did use Charm spells on them, and learned that they had not in fact set the guild on fire (the death cultists did, but the players did not have a way to know that), and also learn their true purpose for coming to the dungeon. And then things went south from there.

They came up with the idea of using the Charmed dragon hybrids to lure more of their fellows out so that they may be tackled individually, before the party takes on Ossirex. As they needed only one of the dragon hybrid to make the plan work, they had to decide on what to do with the other one. Some of the players wanted to kill him, which I told them was something which Tamira, being a cleric of Kellos, would not agree to. In the ensuing argument, Tamira's player did not actively try to prevent this from happening, and Moonshadow's player decided that he would simply stab the dragon hybrid while the rest of the party was arguing.

I decided that Gamdar, who had volunteered to be their bearer, was so outraged by the unnecessary killing that he dropped all of the party's gear and started to walk off... and that's when they Charmed him too, tied him up, and knocked him out.

The party sent the remaining dragon hybrid back to the lair with the command to lure the others out. I decided that their leader, a sorcerer, would see through the ruse and dispel the magic, and in turn use the Invisibility and Fury Fire spells (a fireball centred around the caster) to ambush the PCs instead. In the resulting fight the PCs took a lot of damage, but were able to kill all but the leader, who fled back to the hall.

When Tamira tried to heal the party, I told her that her spells weren't working. It wasn't long before my players realised that I had ruled that Kellos had withdrawn his spells from Tamira. Tamira's player, being an old school gamer, knew what to do: he made her set up and impromptu shrine and prayed for guidance.

Meanwhile, we got into an OOC argument about whether Kellos was justified in doing what he did. The players argued that the dragon hybrids' plan to release an undead dragon would result in many deaths, and for that they already deserved death; also, in their circumstances they could not risk having a prisoner around. I argued that the PCs could have tied up the dragon hybrid, and then gone on to destroy Ossirex, which would have neutralised the threat without them having to kill a defenceless prisoner.

Eventually I let Kellos give Tamira her powers back, on a "probational" basis given the threat they all faced, but by the the mood at the table was already soured.

With her powers restored, Tamira was able to buff the party really well, and the boss fight turned out to be less exciting than I had hoped for. There was some interaction with the surroundings, as the players tried to bring the ceiling down on the skeletons - I had made some rubble counters for this expressed purpose as I imagined Ossirex would use his tail to sweep down pillars and bring sections of the ceiling down to separate the PCs - but I had the feeling that our hearts were not really in it.

Things got worse after the fight, as the players now had to decide what to do with the Heart of Nodros. I told them that Tamira was able to intuit by holding the mace of Druentes that the mace could destroy the Heart, but the wielder would be killed in the process. Tamira's player was keen to destroy the Heart there and then, while others argued for bringing it back to Brother Othar and perhaps subsequently to the church in Vynevale. Then they came up with the idea of Charming the bound Gamdar and making him do the deed for them instead so none of the PCs would have to die.

As this discussion went on Moonshadow and Kimly's players moved their characters away from Tamira as they saw what would be coming, and when it seemed like Leowe and Madian would force the issue, Tamira's player had her destroy the Heart before they could get their hands on it. There was a blinding explosion which brought more of the ceiling down, and when the dust had settled the Heart could not be told apart from the rubble.

Leowe salvaged as much of Tamira's remains as he could, hoping that the church could resurrect her, but they were unable to. We ended the campaign with Tamira being made a saint and a shrine of her being set up at the former site of the guild, and Leowe carrying Tamira's remains in his backpack and vowing to find a way to bring her back to life again.

I am deeply disappointed with how the session went and how the campaign ended. I am not yet sure when things began to spin out of my control, and when I could have effectively steered the game away from the way it went.

Charm and Command spells are always problematic in an RPG, and I do wonder if I should ban PCs from having access to them in the future.

Obviously the players saw the situations presented to them as tactical problems to be solved, and not moral choices to be made, which points to a failure on the part of the GM to present the world in a fashion that encouraged them, or rather their characters, to view the world as a place where the killing of defenceless people was something that even hardened adventurers would not do.

There is definitely a lesson to be learned here for me, although I cannot yet tell what it is.

I hope to do a retrospective of the campaign in the future, not so much on how the campaign went, but what I learned about running an open-table megadungeon using an OSR set of rules.

Chronicles of the Adventurers' Guild #16

On the 17th day of Ostar, guild members Kelso, Kimly, Leowe, and Erik, (see PC profiles here) with the bearer Karl in employment, and accompanied by the mendicant monk Brother Tuck, returned to the southeastern section of the underground complex.

Here, they entered the south door in the chamber with coloured walls, and defeated the undead within, and recovered the grave goods, which included a fine bronze sword.

Then, returning to the eastern corridors, they explored the four side chambers, each of which they learned house a bronze skull upon a plinth, and each of which was protected by an elemental guardian. The party was able to defeat the elemental guardians in turn and retrieve the four bronze skulls, which when placed into the niches in the central bronze door, caused it to open.

The bronze door lead into a large hall, within which was a single sarcophagus and much grave goods contained in earthen urns. A ghostly form arose from the sarcophagus when the party attempted to recover the grave goods, and began to attack them with elemental magic, but the members were able to defeat it and recover the grave goods, which included a golden sceptre with four precious stones set upon its head.

Grave goods recovered were assessed to be 251 Gros in value, of which 84 Gros was disbursed to the members according to the terms of the contract. Member Kimly purchased the bronze sword at 66 Gros, and member Kelso purchased the sceptre at 66 Gros.

Addendum:

On the night of the 17th day of Ostar, the guild hall, as well as the Kellos chapel nearby were set on fire by unknown arsonists. Most guild members and staff were able to evacuate the hall, but bearer Karl died in the fire, and many others suffered from the effects of inhalation the noxious smoke.

I was able to salvage with my person these chronicles, and Harnold was able to keep safe the Guild ledger and much of the guild's treasury, but much of the sundries and supplies were consumed by the flames.

When we sent for help at Fort Rodric, we learned that the garrison had been taken ill, with tainted food being the suspected cause.

Our pressing need now is to care for those who are stricken, which we do with the aid of Brother Othar and his guests from Vynevale, but it seems several guild members wish to undertake a final expedition to the barrows, for what goal I know not.

Signed,

Jeras, Guild Chronicler

Prepping and Running the Game

This is the penultimate session of the campaign, and it happened that the four players who could attend are the same who will be in the Sorcery! sequel campaign, so we played a short session before going on to create characters for that campaign.

There were no healer PC available, so my players petitioned me for a hireling healer, and I decided to conjure up a monk to join them.

The session was filled with shenanigans, such as when Leowe inadvertently caused damage to the other party members when he used Gust of Force on a Fire Elemental, and Kelso returned the favour on his turn, and when the other members pranked Leowe by slamming the door and leaving him alone with an Air Elemental in a room instead of going in to help him as they agreed.

The delve ended with the party getting their hands on two magical items: a flaming sword, and a sceptre that grants the holder resistance to elemental damage.

In the final part of the session I set the lead-up to the finale session: visitors from Vynevale - Brothers Grimmel and Berkin (see here), accompanied by two justicars - bring grave news from the holy city; the copy of inscription sent to Vynevale by Brother Othar was recognised to be the same script as an ancient manuscript, which told the story of one Druentes, a follower of Eusodes (Yasoda), and the company he led into the crypts of Nodros cultists in a quest to destroy the Heart of Nodros, a magical artifact that gave them the power to raise undead. Druentes was betrayed and killed, but his follwoers were able to chase the cultists to the northeast sector of the crypts, and collapse the tunnel there, trapping them and the Heart of Nodros. Druentes was buried in the crypts as he requested in his dying words, that he may watch over the evil in case they should rise again.

Although they did not know the true intent of the dragonkin and his party, the players were able to put two and two together and realise that the Heart of Nodros and the fact that the Ashen Hills was once the site of a great battle during the Dragon Wars and therefore contained perhaps many remains of dragons made for a bad combination.

Brothers Othar and Grimmel then beseeched the PCs to return to the underground complex and recover the Heart of Nodros before someone else did. The players briefly considered returning straightaway, but decided to do so the next morning.

This allowed me to proceed with my plan and have the death cultists set the halls on fire in retaliation for the PCs' part in their ousting. I then told the players that one out of their two PCs is incapacitated from smoke inhalation, and they would each have to decide which character to use for the final session.

I am hoping to be able to get six players around the table for our finale, which should be one big fight, after which we will convert the surviving characters to 5E, and archive them for a future campaign. We will then hopefully be able to have a discussion and decide on what campaign to play after the Sorcery! campaign sequel.

Blood Bowl 2021 League Round #3

After a couple of weeks' break we got back to our league again.

This time round my skavens faced the Black Orc team. Adrian spent some gold recruiting a trained troll to his team, which gave me a lot of gold for inducement.

We rolled on the weather table and got rain, which was a bad thing for me. I won the coin toss and chose to receive, and scored a classic skaven two-turn touchdown, which was a shock to Adrian.

We then rolled a "Blitz" on the next kick-off, which saw me run two players into the Black Orc's half and interfered with the Black Orc's drive. Adrian was close to the touchdown line at turn 8, but a failed throw team mate roll saw him go into the second half one point down.

In the second half he formed a cage and methodically drove down the pitch, but unfortunately the dice were still not in his favour as he failed to put any skaven into the Casualty box. He scored on turn 14, leaving me two turns to try to win the game. This time round the Black Orc team was ready for my skavens, and although I managed to run three players into his half on turn 15, he managed to mark all of them, and I dropped the ball on my final hand-off that saw me one die-roll away from winning.

I was actually worried about facing the Black Orc team, but as Adrian's team was heavy on the heavies, it left him with fewer goblins to run defence.

At the end of the third game, the standing is as follows:

Kazak Killers: 6

Badland Brawlers: 4

Skavenholme Scallyways: 4

Middenheim Marauders: 0

Musings on Gaming #4 - Soul

Although I have been GMing since around 1986, I didn't really give any thought to the themes of my campaigns until perhaps ten years ago. For the first twenty-five years of my "career" as a GM, I had largely let my players make whatever character they wanted, and then ran them through a string of unrelated module, never bothering much with the theme of the campaign, or the motivations of the PCs: I presented a villain/treasure map, and it was their jobs as PCs to defeat that villain/kill whatever was guarding that treasure and take it.

Granted, most of those years were my teenage years when my players and I were just content with exploring dungeons and killing stuff and gaining cool magical items. Gaming was rare during my university and working years, until around 2008, when the re-release of Dragon Warriors led to me meeting Adrian on an RPG forum, which led to a regular Saturday gaming sessions at his place.

The first breakthrough for me came during the Lone Wolf campaign I ran for the group. The players were all playing the good guys: Sommerlending Knight, Kai Lord, Brotherhood Mage. I told the players:"think Star Wars, and you are the Jedi", and we went through a series of unrelated modules from that I stringed together. A few sessions into the game, I felt that the PCs were getting too bloodthirsty, often killing bad guys even after they had incapacitated them - we are talking about humans here, not Giak or Drakkarim. I addressed this in-game by having their masters comment on that they were getting closer to the dark side and urging them to exercise mercy and restraint to redeem themselves.

The campaign then continued with me using a Conan module, where the villain, in the guise of a priest of a good order, used the death of his predecessor, a much loved champion of the poor, to foment social division and call for violence against the rich - a mysterious monster was murdering innocent people in the city, and the priest was claiming that it was divine retribution for the sins of the rich. As the days went by, tension began to build and threatened to boil over into mass violence. The PCs went about investigating the murders, and came into frequent contact with the priest and the city leaders. The Kai Lord became sympathetic to the position of the priest, while the Mage and the Knight were suspicious of him and tended to side with the city leaders. Much of the sessions were just RPing, and I often had to toggle between the two groups as the party split to interact with the two sides.

When the final confrontation came and it was revealed that the evil priest had raised his predecessor as an undead to murder on his behalf, the Kai Lord was so enraged at this betrayal that he killed the priest, even after he was left defenceless by the others. I then ruled that because of this act, Kai had stripped him of his Kai Discipline powers.

The player was of course unhappy about the whole thing: first being conned by the GM, and then being punished. Fortunately for me, he did not quit the campaign, but soldiered on, redeemed himself, and his powers were eventually restored to him.

I look back at this campaign fondly because it was the first of my campaigns where I felt there was a theme that ran through the sessions. Even though I had not planned it that way to start with, the mere idea that this was "Star Wars, and you are the Jedi" probably guided the way I, and later my players, viewed the actions of the PCs. And the theme of Star Wars - at least the first six movies - was about power, corruption, fall, and redemption.

I have employed the idea of a campaign theme in some of my other campaigns: the theme of "deception" in my Sorcery! campaign, and that of "price of peace" in my Space Opera Season 2. I find that having a theme helps me to plan the sessions, in creating situations where the players, through their PCs, are confronted with the theme of the campaign.

Of course, not all campaigns need a theme, or will benefit from one. Some of my mini-campaigns are just play-throughs of classic TSR modules, and I think that for a funhouse dungeon like White Plume Mountain it is perhaps the lack of a theme rather than the presence of one that makes it so memorable.

The employment of a theme, while useful for a more GM-directed campaign, may work less well in a more player-directed, or sandbox type of campaign, where the theme may instead emerge from the plans and actions of the PCs.

In such a campaign, in place of a predetermined theme, it is more suitable to employ what Matt Colville calls a "central tension" for the campaign setting.

The central tension is perhaps implied in the original D&D, with the duality in alignment: Law vs Chaos. It is hard-baked into the White Wolf RPGs, where the purported aim of the various "X; The Y" games is to explore the tension in our modern society through the lens of some non-human being, whose non-humanity forces us to examine our own humanity. Or something like that. I've only ever GM'd Mage: the Ascension, and I not not sure I did it correctly.

Regardless of whether you use a central tension that comes with the setting, or whether you create one of your own, central tension is what creates drama and invites the PCs to act. Two sides are in conflict, or will soon be in open conflict, and the PCs have the choice to make on which side they wish to see win in this conflict, and how they choose will decide that.

How your players choose, however, will be decided by their characters' motivations, which will be the topic of the next post in this series.

Future Campaign/s

This post is primarily for the players in my group, although if you are a follower and have some suggestion on what campaign we should play in the near future, do leave your comments.

With the Sorcery! 2 campaign scheduled to run from April to May, we can start planning for the campaign that will follow it; and if we like more than one of them, we can always queue them for future campaigns.

I've got a few ideas for what we can play next; the first three follow the drop-in, drop-out format as with the Barrowmaze campaign, while the next three require a more regular attendance.

1. Space Opera Season 3: Deepnight Revelation

This is a Traveller kickstarter I backed a while back and, providing it delivers by May, we will use it as a basis for Season 3 of our Space Opera campaign.

The premise is: after the events in Season 2, the United Confederation found a wormhole in the Dead Zone which they believe lead to the homeworld of the Grens. Together with the Tazanian Empire, they built an exploration vessel, crewed by the best the Confederation, the Empire, and the Neutral Zone have to offer, for a mission to go through the wormhole and find the source of the Gren threat and put an end to it... and Nick, AJ, Kumra Khan, and RB have been asked to head the mission.

Rules will likely be Savage Worlds

Players from the previous Seasons will retain their characters (except for Jet, who is still considered too junior for command and will play as a crew character), and also create a new "crew" character - other players will also each create a crew character. Game will be semi-trope style, with the command team making the command decisions, and the crew PCs doing the execution. Think Star Trek (TNG or Voyager - not Discovery).

We will continue the drop-in, drop-out system, with the team for the session made up of the players who can make the session.

2a. Return to Terrinoth: The B Team aka Lakemane's Larcenous Lackeys

What can I say? I like Terrinoth, and I love some of the characters you guys have made and played.

This campaign picks up where the B Team and Barrowmaze left off.

Our campaign is set in the city of Tamalir, and consist of Therion Lakemane (now Steward to the Count of Pfalzenstein), Whisper Blackmane, Giso, and Tom, (all around level 5) as well as characters from the Barrowmaze campaign. Rules will be 5E, with the Five Torches Deep characters converted over to the corresponding class, with XPs at 1-to-1, i.e. around level 4.

The campaign will probably be more player-directed as we follow the shenanigans of Lakemane and company in their quest for... whatever it is that you guys feel up to!

2b. Return to Terrinoth: The A Team aka Venier's Valourous Vigilantes

Alternatively, we can rejoin the A Team, i.e. Entana, Strigoi, Percy, and the world famous Gio Gerbo, all around level 6.

This campaign will be set in Fulhurst, a village on the edge of the dreaded Mistlands that Entana is holding for the University of Greyhaven. The PCs will be retainers who have joined the party, drawn by the fame of our heroes. You can choose to convert your Barrowmaze characters to 5E, or create a new 5E character at level 4.

Play will be in a style similar to Deepnight Revelation above, with the players for the original party making the "domain-level" decisions, and the retainers doing the actual adventuring. There will be a more definite plot-arc for this campaign.

2c. Return to Terrinoth: The C Team - Guild-Free

In this alternative, you keep one of your characters from the Barrowmaze campaign, convert him/her to 5E, and you form a party. Play will be in the more traditional format. Where will you go? You tell me!

3. Gamma World and Shadowrun mash-up

This is something has been at the back of my mind for years now, and is a mash-up of a Shadowrun-esque campaign we played, and the Gamma World mini-campaign I ran.

The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where civilisation still exists in megacities ruled by vampires, while in the wastelands beyond the city walls scavengers and mutants eke out a living in the hostile landscape.

In the first thread of the story, George Bennett (failed mob doctor), Ice (cyborg street samurai), and Victoria (half-vampire), have fled into the wastelands with a little girl, pursued by vampires who want to use her as a bio-weapon.

In the second thread of the story, our village of mutant sentient-but-not-necessarily-anthropomorphic animals have recently explored a crashed spaceship and returned with high-tech weapons which they hope will help them defend their village against a tribe of human wasteland warriors bent of eliminating all mutants.

As their paths cross, the two parties find that despite their differences, working together may be their only hope for survival in this crazy cross-genre world.

No idea what rules to use yet - the decision will largely depend on whether we want a more gritty game, or a more gonzo, roll-for-your-new-mutation game.

4. Something, something, Jon Hodgson

OK, this one is less worked out, but the idea is to use The Hero's Journey, a set of OSR-ish rules, for some sort of a "journey" campaign.

There are several candidates for the setting, including my old favourite Anglo-Saxon England, Middle Earth, the Lone Wolf world, or the Dragon Warriors world. The key thing is that the campaign should involve some sort of long journey, and lean into the "fellowship" aspects of the rules, and that the mood should be Jon Hodgson art.

5. Something else

Those are four ideas I have, but if you have something that you think the group will enjoy playing, and if I think I can do the idea justice, then do bring it to the discussion.

It can be a short campaign, or a long-ish one, fantasy, sci-fi, pulp, or modern - I am open to running most things except Horror, which I don't think I will be competent at.

So let me know what your thoughts are!

Dwarrowdeep Kickstarter

Being a dwarf sucks. You delve too deep *one time*, and now that's what everybody remembers about your people...

From the creator of Barrowmaze comes a new kickstarter: Dwarrowdeep.

Now neither the name nor the premise of the megadungeon sound innovative, but the author hints at a plot twist... But the point of Old School, as least as far as I am concerned, is not doing something *new*, but doing something old *well*.

I enjoyed Barrowmaze, even though I did not run the dungeon 'as is' - I mean, no one can actually run this thing 'as is', right?

What I liked about Barrowmaze is how there is a logic to the whole megadungeon, from the whole reason why the dungeon was there, to why there were different 'districts' to the dungeon, and why the monsters are there, as well as NPC factions with their own motivations.

And now it looks like Greg Gillespie is promising something like that again: a megadungeon with a reason and coherence.

I am still on the fence on this one: delivery date of Aug 2022 is too far even for me to plan for, but a lost dwarven home is something that you can drop into almost any fantasy world - heck, I can drop it into Magnamund, Thedas, *and* Terrinoth, and have the campaign link back to one or more PC in each of the worlds!

Chronicles of the Adventurers Guild #15

On the 14th day of Ostar, guild members Aksinya, Erik, Folly, Francis, Grak, Kelso, Kimly, Leowe, Madian, Moonshadow, Piper, and Tamira (see PC profiles here) explored the underground complex via barrow #35. Exploring to the west, they came upon a series of chambers, guarded by undead, which they defeated, and recovered much grave goods.

Grave goods recovered were assessed to be 525 Gros in value, of which 131 Gros was disbursed to the members according to the terms of the contract.

Signed,

Jeras, Guild Chronicler

On the 16th day of Ostar, guild members Tamira, Madian, Kimly, and Leowe, with the bearer Karl in employment, explored the underground complex via barrow#16. Exploring west and then south, they came upon a chamber within which were the crushed remains of tomb robbers. The stones upon the walls of the chamber animated and took the form of men, and attacked the party when they sought to cross the chamber, but they were able to overcome the enemies.

Proceeding further south, they came upon a fork in passage. To the west they came upon a bronze door, upon which were four niches, each carved with a different symbol, which they surmised to represent the four elements. To the east the passage led to a square room, within which was a bronze statue of a four-armed demon. The four walls were painted each a different colour: blue, yellow, red, and brown. There were a sealed door on the north, east, and south walls.

The party broke down the eastern door, and found within it a single sarcophagus. When they sought to open the sarcophagus, a ghostly form appeared and attacked them, but they were able to defeat it. Within the sarcophagus the found the remains of an individual with much grave goods. The party then broke through the northern door, and found again a single sarcophagus. Once more a ghostly undead rose to attack them, and once more they defeated it, but member Tamira was grievously wounded in the fight. The party recovered the rich grave goods within the sarcophagus, and returned to the guild.

Grave goods recovered were assessed to be 186 Gros in value, of which 64 Gros was disbursed to the members according to the terms of the contract.

Signed,

Jeras, Guild Chronicler

Prepping and Running the Game

This session was a continuation from the last one, although we had to retcon a little because of player availability.

The party came upon the fight between the Dragon cultists and the Death cultists, and a confused melee ensued, made worse by the use of the darkness spell by the Death cult leader. Eventually the PCs were able to gain the upper hand and drive the Death cultists away, but they were able to flee through the room with zombies, which delayed the pursuing Dragon cultists enough for them to escape.

The two victorious parties then looted the belongings left behind - I used one of the random tables from Knock! #1 as a random loot table - and I had the Dragonkin rogue from the Dragon cult gather the grave goods and divide them into four piles, and then inviting the PCs to pick three of them as their cut of the loot. This was done to show the players that the Dragon cultists were either stand-up fellows, or else not really interested in money...

It was a massive haul, but divided among 11 PCs, it didn't come up to much per character.

One of the players was still fixated on the idea that the undead woman in the underground pool was what the cultists were after, and managed to convince the others to break the terms of the agreement with the Dragon cultists and make a night-time trip to the cavern, a sector that was technically out of bounds to the PCs, to search it more thoroughly.

I was totally unprepared for this - I have told them that the area was rumoured to be crawling with undead after sundown, and no one in their right mind would travel there after dark, and assumed they would never do so either. During the time they were discussing this I realised I could use one of the mechanics in Five Torches Deep to resolve the journey. This mechanic was intended to allow a GM to resolve a session if there wasn't enough time to play a party's journey to the base, and involved having each character make a single roll to see how many hit points he or she lost. As we were using this to roll for the forward journey, this meant some of the PCs started the delve with many hit points down, and had to cast healing spells, which had the risk of the caster losing the ability to cast spells for the actual delve. Fortunately for them, that did not happen.

The players then went through in detail how they searched the cavern, and I had to come up with something quick to not disappoint them. I decided that the undead woman was the ghost of a woman strangled and sacrificed in the pool, like a bog mummy. The party was able to recover her skeleton, which they decided to bring back to the guild. The player now wants to see if he can somehow resurrect the woman with the aid of the NPC cleric...

The following adventuring day the players decided to stick to the agreement with the Dragon cultists and explore the part of the dungeon that now "belongs" to the guild. This section of the dungeon features an elemental evil theme, so the things they discover there all featured the same theme.

The eastern branch of the passage actually leads to five other corridors, including the one with the bronze door with niches. The other four corridors each led to a room that held one of the keys to the bronze door. Strangely, instead of walking down the other four corridors, my players decided to explore the western corridor, and came upon the room with the coloured walls and statue. They at first assumed that the statue was the key to opening the bronze door, but could not figure out how that worked. Then when one player had his character touch one of the walls, I described how the pigment rubbed off onto his hand. The next thing I knew I had four PCs, each with one hand covered in pigment inside one of the niches. It was a face-palm moment, and I told the players that had this been a Gygaxian dungeon, we would be having four one-handed PCs right now.

That said, I am happy with how they got into the OSR mode and explored various ways of interacting with the environment I described to try to solve the puzzles they faced (or for that matter, created for themselves...). Most of their initiatives were not rewarded, however, as I could not reasonably 'say yes' to them and spin a whole new thread to the campaign and still keep everything on schedule for a finale in two more sessions. The other issue was that XPs in OSR was tied to challenges, and had I allowed their solutions to work, it would not have been fair (and it would not have felt fair to them) to award the PCs enough XPs for them to level up before the final session.

The chasing of the red herring (the strangled woman) was an interesting one. I wonder if this was a side-effect of using a pre-made module. Had I designed the adventure on my own from ground up, perhaps I would have been 'economical' and omitted any element that did not relate to the main plot.

Unable to figure out the bronze door, they decided to just fall back on what they knew best: break down doors, kill undead, take their stuff. They were able to clear two of the three crypts in the square room before they ran out of spells and return to the guild, which was perfect for me - hopefully they will complete this section of the dungeon the next session, which will allow me to end that session with the big reveal, and set up the final session.

Musings on Gaming #3 - Space

All of the fantasy RPG worlds that I set my campaigns in - Terrinoth/Menara, Ferelden/Thedas, Magnamund, Dragon Warriors' Legend, and Fighting Fantasy's Titan - are large worlds, presumably Earth-sized planets.

While it is fun to read about the diverse regions in the world, it is improbably that a single adventuring party will travel to all or even most of the places described in a setting book. Nevertheless, there is a way for GMs to convey the size of the world to the players without having to take the PCs to all these places.

The first is of course to have the PCs come across and interact with people and things which come from these foreign, far-flung regions. Most fantasy medieval worlds have a functioning trade system, and often trade is the chief reason the movement of people and goods across vast distances; others that I can think of are pilgrimage and conquest (which in itself usually stems from a desire to move people and goods...). People and goods from foreign lands are distinguished by the fact that they are different from the local people and goods, and these differences can be expressed both culturally and materially.

One of the most obvious difference between peoples is of course language, and here is where I dislike the concept of the Common language (as conveniently as it makes the job of the GM), unless there is an in-world reason such as the existence of a continent-spanning empire. In settings where the region the game is set in is an analogue of our own Dark Ages or Middle Ages, this becomes even more glaring. In our own world, 'national' languages in the form which we understand them now did not exist in medieval Europe, and that is something that I like to reflect in my game worlds too.  

To a lesser extent this dislike also applies to the existence of "racial" languages like Dwarven or Elvish, unless again there are in-world reasons for why certain races should have a language that changes very little over a span of hundred of years, such as the people being very long-lived, or that the language is being guarded very zealously, such as with a liturgical language, or with a very closed community.

For these reasons I dislike spells that allow PCs to understand or speak foreign languages (I save that kind of thing for my sci-fi campaigns), as it takes away the uniqueness of the cultures. In fact, I lean further into the differences in language, and sometimes describe my NPCs as having an accent that is from a different part of the same nation that the PCs are from, or using a local expression not familiar to them. Where communities of "demi-humans" live among humans, I describe them as speaking the same local language as the humans, but with words from their own languages sprinkled here and there. Where an NPC is not a fluent speaker of the language the PCs are speaking, I describe them as speaking with a heavy accent, haltingly, and/or with a different grammar.

Another way to portray the vastness of the game world, and also its age, is to have indicators of migrations of ancient people in the setting. The fact that much of Europe now speak an Indo-European language and practise a Semitic religion is the result of movements of culture and peoples across a period of millennia, and something that at once speaks of how big our world is and how old human cultures are. GMs can allude the existence of such movements of cultures and peoples by having languages that are related, and having say the head church/temple of a religion or its pilgrimage site being far away from the PCs' native place.

Chronicles of the Adventurers Guild #14

Prepping and Running the Game

This week's report takes a slightly different format for a couple of reasons: 1. the PCs are unlikely to be truthful in their report to Guild Chronicler Jeras, and 2. we ended the game mid-delve, which we have not done before.

A brief recap of the session.

The PCs decided that they would go along with the tomb-robbers' plan to launch a co-ordinated attack on the Death cultists.

To accommodate the fact that 12 PCs were in on the scheme but only four players were at the table, we had the players who were present send their characters into the dungeon, while the rest stood guard at the known exits to cut off any retreat.

However, as Kelso's player was convinced that the strange woman on the island in the underground pool was the quarry the dragonkin are after, the PCs proposed a start time of 1pm, to allow them to try to find out her true nature. Unfortunately for them, the woman was just a "monster of the room", and cost the PCs a little resources.

Moving back to the main mission, the PCs moved through the door they had barricaded the last session, and managed to find the secret door that led into a room that would have led to the cultists' lair.

The room was guarded by ten zombies and an Idolic Deity, a monster from the Tome of Beast. The flying statuette had the power of casting an aura that eroded a divine caster's faith, and the two strongest members in the party were nerfed and fell back. Here the players fell back to OSR thinking and threw a fishing net over the statuette and wrestled it down and bashed it to bits, while keeping the zombies at bay with a area-control spell.

Since they did not clear the room of the zombies, however, they failed to find the secret door that would have led to the cultists' west flank. Already late for the attack, they had to rely on their map and execute a wide march to the south and then east, before finally coming upon the passage that led to the cultists' east flank by following the sound of battle.

As one of the players had to leave early, and as I had not expected this development, we ended the session about half an hour early, just as they PCs are running towards the fight.

This gives me a week to plan the fight that we will open the session with. I am still not sure how to do this: on the one hand the Death cultists are outnumbered and they have a clear route for retreat (something which I was worried about before this development), yet on the other hand I would hate to have ended a session early in anticipation of a big fight... and then make it an anti-climatic rout.

Well, I have a week to plan for this, so let's see what happens!

Musings on Gaming #2 - Time

In this post I would like to talk about the role of time in world-building.

It is common for the typical medieval-fantasy RPG world to have a long history - a "lore" - and while I do not do any world-building of my own, I agree with that practice; in our own world, thousands of years of written history existed before the medieval period, and tens of thousands more are known through archaeology, and millions more known through other scientific fields.

When looking at fantasy worlds, I tend to view their histories through the lens of our own prehistory and history, and this for me is when the suspension of disbelief becomes difficult.

Many of the fantasy settings I have game in have histories that are both too long and too short: typically, the period of prehistory is too short, with species coming into existence and then reaching a medieval-level civilisations in the blink of an eye, and then remaining at that level for much longer than our own medieval period lasted.

One way of rationalising this is to look at the official lore or "fluff" as something which the peoples of the fantasy worlds viewed as their own history, and not necessarily as the truth. Just as in our own world people gave accounts of the origins of themselves and lists of kings which we today see as bearing some core of truth but over all inaccurate, so too can we see the fluff. Similarly, the peoples in these worlds also imagined their ancestors as having the same level of technology as they possessed, much as how our own medieval artists depicted supposedly ancient kings in contemporary armour and weapons.

Interpreting the official lore of the worlds this way makes it easier for me to accept them as real, and I try to bring this across to my players by mapping the historical periods in the game world to our own, such that when they explored ancient ruins or tombs they would come across artifacts and burial practices that mirrored those of our world: a period when material culture could be identified but there was no metal working, a period with copper alloy or bronze working, and finally an age with iron and steel artifacts. 

Setting the history of the game world against our own also allows me to determine the level of technology that is appropriate to the period. Our own "Middle Ages" spans a thousand years, and it will be wrong to imagine that the level of technology, or the prevailing system of government and law remained static during the entire span of time. So if a player asked me if a certain thing - say eyeglasses - existed in the game world, I can find out when they were invented in our own world, and decide if they would exist in the game world. On a more general scale, technologies that improved agricultural yields or trade would have enormous impact on the populations and material prosperity of the peoples and places our PCs existed among, so if the world had large cities with cosmopolitan populations and exotic goods, I would have to make sure that the technologies that allowed for such a world existed.

Going further back in time, I often think about the existence of several humanoid or "demi-human" races/species in fantasy worlds and how that might work in a "real" world.

Probably every culture in our world has their own creation myth and how they came into being. Whether these myths were viewed as literal truths by the people who told them, or whether they were understood to be an expression of the place they saw themselves in the scheme of things, I think we can safely say that they are all factually wrong.

Our own species is now believed to be an admixture of archaic humans and other hominid species. This, and the fact that there were several hominid species leads me to wonder if the various fantasy races could in fact be viewed in the same light: not as peoples created separately by their own gods and distinct from the other races, but as different branches on the evolutionary tree. Certainly it would be interesting to imagine a scenario where all the hominid species in our own world all existed in the same period and developed civilisation. None of this is likely to have an impact in gameplay, but it is again something which makes the game world more real to me.

Of course time is only one of the dimensions which give a sense of realism and depth to our game worlds - the other dimension is space, which we will discuss in the next post in the series.

Blood Bowl 2021 League Round #2

Game 2 saw my skavens face off against David's Imperial Nobility team.

My thrower suffered a stat loss in my first game and I made the decision to drop him from the team, but at the same time I did not have enough gold to employ another thrower. Without a thrower, my skavens had to play a running game, and they failed to score during my possession.

In the second half, they took advantage of David's inexperience and ran into the opposition team's half and took possession of the ball and score.

David was able to capitalise on the skaven's losses in the last part of the game and drive close to my touchline line, but an ambitious Rush saw his player fall and break his neck, which allowed my players to scoop up the ball and throw it into the other half of the pitch for safety.

I scraped a 1-0 win, and made enough money to recruit a new thrower, but one of my gutter-runners died during the match, which means I end the game with the same Current Team Value as I started the game with.

At the end of the second game, the league table looks like this:

Kazak Killers : 6

Badland Brawlers: 3

Skavenholme Scallywags: 3

Middenheim Marauders: 0

Blood Bowl 2021 League Round #1

We played the first games of our Blood Bowl league on Thursday.

My Skavens faced the dwarves in their first game. Winning the coin flip, my skavens managed to 'cas' a dwarf slayer in the first turn, and score on the second turn. From then on it was a game of attrition as the dwarves methodically took my players down one by one, with one player escaping death due to the presence of an apothecary.

FG handled the dwarves boldly, scoring two touchdowns, and by the time I was receiving again I was fielding seven players against his eleven.

My Thrower lost a point of Strength, and I decided to drop him from the team. One of the Blitzers managed to gain a total of 6 SPPs due to the MVP roll, and I gave him Mighty Blow - hopefully that advantage will result in a positive feedback mechanism that will see him gain more SPPs.

At the end of the first round of games, the league table is:

Badland Brawlers: 3

Kazak Killers: 3

Middenheim Marauders: 0

Skavenholme Scallywags: 0

Chronicles of the Adventurers Guild #13

On the 12th day of Ostar, Guild members Madian, Kimly, Tamira, Folly, and Leowe (see PC profiles here), with the bearer Karl in employment, explored the subterranean tombs. Entering via barrow #20, they came upon a long hall, wherein they found the remains of several tomb robbers. Thus forewarned, the party entered the chamber, whereupon the pillars animated and took the forms of men, and attacked them, but were overcomed.

Passing north still, they came into a square chamber and surprised two cultists within. The party sought to capture the cultists, but they refused to be taken, and a skirmish ensued. The cultists were soon joined by skeletal warriors, which entered the chamber from the corridor to the north, and also by several more cultists entering from a corridor to the east.

The party was able to hold off the skeletal warriors and repel the cultists, who retreated under the cover of a magical darkness. The party defeated the skeletal warriors, and using the remnants of the stone creatures in the the hall they had passed, blocked up the door to the east.

Proceeding further north, they came upon a passage leading to the east that had collapsed; here they found signs that the collapsed passage was being cleared.

Passing further north, they found that the passage turned to the east, and continued for several hundred feet, and terminated in a natural cavern, within which was an underground pond. At the near side of the pond was a boat. At the far end of the cavern was a small landing, beyond which a tunnel could be discerned. In the middle of the pond was a rocky outcrop.

The boat being small and unable to take the weight of all six persons, the party resolved to cross the pond in turn. In the first passing, they discerned the form of a woman with long hair seated upon the rocky outcrop. As the boat neared the outcrop, a force began to pull it towards the outcrop. The party was able to overcome this with vigourous rowing, and upon reaching the far shore they found long strands of hair on the hull. Then, steering as far from the outcrop as practicable, the party made further crossings, and the whole party was able to reach the far bank unharmed.

Entering the tunnel there, the party emerged within barrow #49, which they found to be already plundered.

No grave goods were recovered.

Signed,

Jeras, Guild Chronicler

Prepping and Running the Game

I was really excited that we managed to get five players for this session, as I had planned for this to be the big fight scene where the PCs and the dragon cultists launch a co-ordinated attack on the death cultists; unfortunately, plans never survive contact with PCs...

We began the session by playing out the negotiation between the dragon cultists - posing as plain tomb-robbers - and the PCs.

The dragon cultists were represented by their leader (a dragon-kin), the dragon-kin barbarian whom the PCs have met in an earlier session, and three of their human mercenaries. The dragon-kin proposed a co-ordinated attack on the death cultists' lair, with the PCs attacking from the west, and they attacking from the east. I made the very generous terms of leaving exploration rights to all the surface barrows to the PCs afterwards, plus all of the underground complex except for the quadrant north and east of the cultists' lair, as well as half of whatever loot they will take from the cultists, and sharing of whatever documents they recover.

The PCs were naturally suspicious of the terms, but I had decided beforehand that they would not be able to read the dragon-kin's faces. Still, this did not prevent them from asking for even better terms!

I had the barbarian speak to the leader in their own language, which ruffled the PCs' feathers, but they agreed to give the PCs three-quarters of the cultists' loot, which caused furrowed brows in the human mercenaries.

The players were very keen to learn the dragon-kin's interest in the northeast quadrant of the complex, and wanted to know what item exactly it was that they hoped to find there, but I gave the Sauron-ic reply that it is a "trifle that he fancies", which of course convinced no one. 

While they did not fully trust the dragon-kin, the PCs agreed to the temporary alliance, with no real intent to keeping to the terms.

The attack was planned for the 13th of the month, as the merchant bringing supplies from Tamalir was expected to arrive on the 12th, and the dragon cultists wanted to be well-prepared.

I expected the players to wait for the attack, but they surprised me by choosing to launch another expedition on the 12th, hoping to find out where exactly the death cultists' lair was. As they already had some idea of where the lair was, they quickly came upon the cultists' sentries, which triggered a fight. With five PCs and quite a few of them at level 4, their experience in dungeon-fighting and powers allowed them to quickly dominate the fight, forcing the cultists to retreat.

Their decision to blockade the door to the east essentially sealed the cultists' access to the northeast, a sector of the complex which is of interest to them. This really pushes them up against a wall, as even if they can easily unblock the door, the room is the main access to their lair and connects that to the sector they want to explore.

I now have a couple of tough decisions to make as the GM and the death cult leader: did the PCs' actions tip the cultists off to a possible impending attack? Will the cultists launch a surprise attack on the dragon cultists pre-emptively, with the aim of taking over their lair?

I have a few days to think this through...