We did it, people. We came up with a Braunstein idea that fit in a tweet and then we ran it and it was excellent. Buckle in, there's a lot of legwork that went into this one.
Get in loser, we're going storygaming |
Campaign diary and RPG musings of a Canadian halfwit
We did it, people. We came up with a Braunstein idea that fit in a tweet and then we ran it and it was excellent. Buckle in, there's a lot of legwork that went into this one.
Get in loser, we're going storygaming |
Appendix N makes no specific mention of which Leigh Brackett works are of inspiration for D&D. Thanks to the presence of John Carter in the Appendix, many gravitate to the Eric John Stark stories, especially Black Amazon of Mars. This post is not about Stark, but it is about a square-jawed American confronting ancient evils on Mars.
Appearing as the first story in "The Coming of the Terrans", this story is about a guy (Captain Burk Winters) who thinks his lady is dead, and wants to forget. There's a trendy new "drug" on Mars: Shanga, the Going-Back. In smaller doses, it regresses the mind of the user down the evolutionary chain, and overworked Terran yuppies come to Mars to get regressed to primitive man and frolic in a garden for a few hours. But our hero wants more. He wants to regress so far he forgets his lost love forever. He doesn't want some diluted, gentrified product, he wants Shanga in the fullest mode of experience. He cuts a deal with a shady Martian, who brings him out to an ancient city far from modernity. Here, radiation is beamed at the subject, and they regress not just mentally but physically. Winters finds himself hairier, stronger, more primitive. But worse, he finds himself in a huge arena, a contained artificial jungle populated by all manner of horrible beasts, all different creatures that were once men before the Shanga dragged them down the primordial chain. Here, in this arena overseen by an evil priestess and resentful colonized martians, our hero must fight to survive against the monstrous antedilluvian ancestors of man, and win before the Shanga pulls him deep enough to be beyond saving. You can read the story in like an hour and a half, so I won't spoil what happens, but you can find it on Project Gutenberg and get in on the goodness yourself!
The story rules, and as far as gameable material goes its a no-brainer. If you do not see the gaming potential in a combination colisseum and zoo where abducted slaves are driven by addiction to mutate down into pre-hominid beasts, observed and mocked by a dying race fuming with ressentiment for ascendent humanity, then you do not deserve to be a Dungeon Master. Tease the players with it, make a mild, diluted Shanga available from some elves as a carousing sort of environment, and let them get drawn in to the web of intrigue centred around a walled-garden dungeon full of prehistoric beasts. Does Shanga work on dogs? Chickens? Bears? I don't see why not. The Monster Manual is full of Paleolithic goodies, make use of them. Tie Shanga in with the Conclave of 6 for a Brozer crossover. Give the Shanga-Crystal to a wizard player at the domain level. Use your imagination, this is high-grade stuff and you'd be an idiot not to use it.
The session last Wednesday was a casual affair, with 4 players in attendance. We did a little in-town interaction, a bit of dungeoncrawling and then carousing. Boilerplate OSR experience circa 2015. But the web of connections and inter-woven motivations present in the Shucked Oyster could not abide this, and we ended the session with abject anarchy literal minutes away from bursting forth throughout the Aberlin region. This was doubly impactful as we were just days away from Oktoberstein, a Braunstein event scheduled around a Harvest Festival. This post will cover both the Adventuring session from October 2 AND the Braunstein from October 5.
We had basically the exact same crew as the previous week with the exception of Taff being missing, and of course last week Alden was decapitated by a Leatherface Berserker Cultist. This week that player was playing the surviving porter Belvedere, who hired his own porter. He took the name Alden for himself and bestowed the title of Belvedere upon the new porter. It is not clear how many times this cycle has occurred, Dread Pirate Roberts style.
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"It's over Borlov! I have depicted you as a soyjak!" |
The adventures of my medieval-fantastic Ottawa Valley continued this past Wednesday as our squad of adventurers awoke from a night of raucous carousing at the Shucked Oyster and sought to replenish their reserves of gold. We had 5 players compared to last week's 3, introducing 3 new characters, making the party this week:
1. Francois Jean-Marc Marseilles, with his 4 surviving men-at-arms
2. Jonathan the Once-Herder, looking for a good time
3. Alden, a sell-sword who styles himself as a disgraced knight, along with his squire (porter) Belvedere
4. Taff, a fighter.
5. Gard, a fighter with only 1 hit-point.
We're back, after a lengthy hiatus from writing as I concluded my undergraduate studies I have returned to begin documenting my games in the written word once more. The Dschungelberg Campaign came to a close, and now it is time to explore new avenues. We will be dialing back from the encroachments of the Supplements that arrived at us just defaulting to AD&D and returning to OD&D in the form of Dragons Beyond, though this time we are not permitting the arrival of the d20 and the Alternate Combat System. We will be using Chainmail as rigorously as possible (Though many say this is not possible!) and exploring the "Lowest Fantasy" setting ever put to our table. Effectively just medieval, with magic and fantastic elements intended to be as infrequent, uncommon, and deeply evil as one might see in the Howard Conan stories or Arthurian myth. The players will all be playing fighters for the foreseeable future, though magic will be accessible to some of them on account of the ELDRITCH and VILE nature of their assigned factions. While the factions (and campaign map) were primarily generated using the AD&D DMG, I have "massaged" the results to integrate well with the Shucked Oyster by Black Lodge Games as well as a Lamentations of the Flame Princess module that I will be revealing at a later date (We love surprises!).
I've written this introductory paragraph in advance, so I will now step away from my computer and get ready to run the session. Things should be interesting, I have sent out the last relevant faction sheet and I look forward to seeing how things will all shake out.
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First session in "Fantasy Ontario" and the adventure is about a stalled-out road crew. Some jokes write themselves. |
After creating a power vacuum by assassinating the colonial governor, pinning it on the church, removing the Snake-Cult that was keeping other magic-using variables out of the city, and generally stirring the pot in remarkable and terrible ways, the party has created a game-state that demanded a Battle Braunstein. We convened at 10am today to resolve all the madness that has been percolating. We resolved 5 turns of action, ending on Wednesday, July 17. With a 2.5 hour lunch break between 11:30 and 2pm to grill and just hang out for a bit we still finished at around 5:30. Overall, about 5 hours of active game time, but oh man did a lot of things happen. We had 6 factions turn up to take action:
The Swamp People, a Neutral Faction run by druids that has been conducting friendly relations with their fellow humans in Dschungelberg. Their primary concern is securing their border against the Orcs and the Spongs
The Orcs, who were chased out of the city by the colonial expedition back in May, who want nothing less than to retake their city from the conniving humans.
The Church, shattered by scandal and the burning of their cathedral, plagued with accusations of torturing Lord Barotha to death, trying to restore Law and Goodness to this tumultuous time and place.
The Mercenaries, who were primarily loyal to Barotha's coffers but in his absence have started considering direct governance. In the last few weeks they have begun a city watch/police effort for the town and are holding the church at arm's length.
Siegfried von Vemmelmordt, a devious wizard who came to the new world with naught but his two loyal apprentices and in just a few months amassed an army consisting of a charmed goblin clan and a few hundred animated skeletons. Truly on the Gigatrillionaire Rags-To-Riches sigma grindset. What it is exactly that he wants is not clear to be honest. His ways are inscrutable, his motives a rotating cypher of numbers and letters and other alphanumerics that changes hourly forever.
The Spongs (Short for "Spawn of Kong") are ape-men headed by an Orangutan Wizard named Augustus Proximus, the Top Banana and High Brunkle. They were built using an approximation of the Troglodyte entry from the Monster Manual, they are run by a friend who DMs a different campaign using pause-time for us (AND I HOPE HE WILL RUN AGAIN SOON I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO IVAR), and they are frankly extremely silly. Troglodyte females, unlike most other humanoids, have 1+1 HD and are assumed to be reasonably combat-capable, and this increases the size of his fighting forces noticeably. The Spongs will almost certainly come up later, but suffice to say their goal today was anarchy and suffering and personal profit.
"210 Feral Spong Women Have Joined the Battle" |
Orders were written for a dawn-to-dawn 24 hour cycle, so the log here shows the orders written on Saturday and resolved/reacted to on Sunday, and so forth.
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Whole lotta thunder this week |
Ran the Battle Braunstein today but I've been out of the loop on blogging my receipts so I wanted to do a little catchup, do a broad-brush account of what has happened since my last session report so that the next post (an after-action report of the Braunstein) has the necessary context. Since I last updated you all, the following things happened over the course of 2.5 sessions:
1. The party had a random encounter with a Very Young Green Dragon, and killed it. Having been flown over in a previous session by a larger Green Dragon, they deduced this was a progeny of the larger dragon and made a mental note to go looking for Lair Treasure at a later date.
2. The Church arrested Lord Barotha, the Elf who was governing the colony, on suspicions of consorting with the Evil Wizard Siegfried, and detained him in the church. This made it incredibly easy (Compared to the Keep) for Han the Thief to don a ring of invisibility and slip in, smothering Barotha with a pillow while he languished in an interrogation room. The mercenaries, who answer to Barotha's coffers, showed up to demand his release, and it seemed to be the case that he died under "advanced interrogation". All of this occured while Figel Narage, a Neutral Cleric, held a political rally against the governance of the Old World Empire, "Why should we send our goods and bounty back to those elvish fops across the ocean?"
3. The Dark Lord Blony Tair joined the Snake-Cult, which was being headed by a mummy whose grave was disturbed by Han the Thief in a previous session. Blony decided to see about recovering the stolen Death Mask of the mummy, in hopes of rising the ranks of the cult. He brought along Olaf the unsuspecting fighter to seek it, hearing it had been taken North. They came to Pabal the Wizard, who impressed upon them that if the mummy should get his mask back, plagues, earthquakes, famine and fissures in the earth would proliferate as the mummy had a centuries-long feud with Ramsugra the Vampire. Blony had a change of heart and decided to instead seek to eliminate the Snake-Cult
4. Using intel from their undercover inside man, the Dark Lord Blony Tair, the party staged a raid on a New-Moon sacrificial ceremony being held beneath the city. Using stone-to-mud and liberal distribution of flaming oil, it was a massacre, over 70 snake-cultists butchered and the Mummy killed and defeated. His body disappeared shortly thereafter, nobody is sure where it went, but the cult lost all its momentum after this vicious strike.
5. The party set out to find the dragon lair. They came across a camp of Berserkers who warned them to turn around and go home, but pressed on and found the cave nonetheless. They staked it out until the dragon left to go hunting, which is when they heard it cackle and jeer as it chased some deer. A talking dragon had them deeply afraid of potential spellcasting, so they decided to try and slip into the lair and steal some treasure and maybe run away back home after. However, I like it when the players roll for monster treasure. And Dobias (who came in clutch against a Medusa early in the campaign) rolled for a magic item. Against all odds: A wand of Polymorph, 2 charges. The plan changed rapidly. Lay low, wait for the dragon to return, and turn it into a kitten.
6. In addition, the dragon's hoard had a Cursed Sword of Berserker. Seamus the Ambitious Fighter picked it up, extremely eager to wield what appeared to be a +2 magic sword. However, on their way home, random encounters brought up Berserkers yet again! Clearly they had trailed the party and intended to relieve them of their loot, and when Seamus drew his sword to fight the curse kicked in, immediately he started making his 4 attacks per round against the nearest living things, namely his own hirelings. Here I did a little Abduction, we have a group of berserkers living near a dragons cave with a Berserker sword in it? That thing is definitely a sacred relic to them. They start calling out "He has the Red Sword! The Blood King is returning!" and fall back to let his rage deal with the adventurers. Dobias makes an executive decision to polymorph Seamus into a hamster, the party fights off the berserkers, escapes with their loot and their lives. They are in Time Jail until the 24th, and when they return to town nothing is going to be the same...
We did it, people. We came up with a Braunstein idea that fit in a tweet and then we ran it and it was excellent. Buckle in, there's a...