OD&D Session 015: Feral Ape-Women Near YOU

     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. 

TURN 1: Sunday, July 14

Prior to the Braunstein kicking off, Siegfried had included in his orders that Friday Night he would sneak into town and use "Transmute Rock-Mud" to knock a mortar off the keep walls, and generally cause large-scale damage to the keep. He produced a gaping hole in the courtyard wall, stripped the walls off the tower, trashed a mortar and injured a half-dozen soldiers, before disappearing into the night. Not a great thing for the clerics and mercenaries to wake up to, but that's life. 

First turn was mostly troop movements and negotiations. Frankly, very little happened. The Orcs started moving all their troops to the war-camp nearest to town. The Spongs maneuvered for future action. The druids Fire Trap Spells on Siegfried's war canoes using trained birds. The Clerics were placing Glyphs of Warding all over weak points in the walls. Things were quiet. Too quiet.

TURN 2: Monday, July 15

Captain Osman Rausch of the mercenary company was found dead, completely drained of blood from two puncture wounds on his neck. The army of Siegfried began marching south to prepare to take potential action against the city. The Swamp People moved their forces in a similar direction. The Orcs used a tactic straight out of the bible and lit fires and made lots of noise in the jungle to make the humans think they were surrounded by a much larger force, as a precedent to opening negotiations with the clerics and the mercenaries. The Spongs sent one army up the river, telling Siegfried they intended to back him and the orcs up against the humans and telling the humans via bird messenger than they intended to help the town defend against the orcs. They sent a second army, with all the leaders and the Top Banana himself to overrun the Library of Shuga-Koth, where Ramsugra the Vampire and Siegfried had been basing their operations out of. With the vampire out assassinating the Mercenary captain and Siegfrieds entire army marching south, it was a cakewalk, the Ape-Wizard headed straight for the deeper levels full of ancient texts and the rest of the spongs set about barricading and securing the library against attackers. 

TURN 3: Tuesday, July 16

The Orcs negotiated a deal with the humans. They offered humans safe passage north to the plains where a new settlement could be founded, free of bloodshed if the humans simply handed over the city. This caused a rift in the mercenary company, with two sub-factions emerging. Lieutenant Marius, by all rights the successor to the void left by Osman's death, was a staunch loyalist to the Empire and, with 50 of his men and 300 of the civilians, demanded that the town must not be surrendered. Captain Thursby, a pragmatic, more experienced officer who recently arrived from the old country to reinforce the troops, saw things differently. Not only was this an opportunity to save the lives of the some 2500-3000 people living in Dschungelberg, it was an opportunity to get out from under the pernicious thumb of taxation that the Empire represented. A fresh, independent start, with him and his men in charge. After the Gideon-esque display of might from the orcs the previous night, the people were willing to leave with him. 

The Clerics saw the hopelessness of the situation and prayed that the Spongs were still coming south to their aid, and set out to join up with the Swamp People in an attempt to flank the enemy. This is where things came to a head. Siegfried, the Spongs, the Swamp People and the Clerics all had an army in the same hex, and it simply made sense to have them duke it out. We laid out the table for a 4-way Chainmail battle, where Siegfried's army was being approached from the west and the east by clerics and swamp-people respectively, and from the north by Spongs. Nobody at that fight knew who the Spongs were there to side with, and everyone hoped it was them. 

The battle ended up being very short, the clerics turn undead wasn't as game-changing as they had hoped, as line of sight in the jungle and the positioning of the skeletons minimized effectiveness. However, 150 archers shooting a volley against 60 Heavy Foot (we used 1:10 scaling) was a bloodbath. The goblin archers and wolf-riders made mince-meat of the clerics, fewer than 50 clerics and paladins survived the battle. The Swamp-people had deployed too far to close to melee distance in reasonable time, but this ended up not mattering, because they had brought all their high-priests. 

Earlier in the game, the Swamp player asked for regular weather reports, as thunderstorms allow the casting of "Call Lightning". I pulled the 7-day forecast for Yucatan, Mexico (1:1 weather achieved!) as this region feels close to the sort of environment that the campaign is taking place in, Gulf of Mexico jungle, and would you look at that:

Whole lotta thunder this week

Call Lightning is a devastating spell. 4 different casts at 6th level and all of Siegfried's soldiers, skeletons and goblins alike, were obliterated. The Spongs didn't raise a finger the whole fight, and afterwards turned around and went home to their newly-claimed Library-Fortress. Siegfrieds apprentices were fried, but Siegfried himself was nowhere to be seen. It is not known where he is, whether he is alive or dead, or what his next moves might be. 

TURN 4: Wednesday, July 17

This was very much an "Aftermath" turn. The loyalists under Lieutenant Marius woke up to the keep surrounded by a very real and not faked army of nearly 1000 orcs, not primed for battle but rather for prolonged siege. The orcs allowed women and children to leave safely and join up with the other humans fleeing north, but the 150 militia and 50 mercenary soldiers were not permitted to leave. The surviving clerics also left to join the caravan north, and the swamp people returned to their home. No reinforcements are coming, and it looks like for the next little while the keep is going to be under Siege. Enterprising gentleman and up-and-coming Dark Lord Blony Tair cut a deal with the orcs, saying that he would personally oversee the docks and manage shipping and trade relations with the old world on their behalf. Some sort of... Union for... Labour? Whatever. 

The mercenaries under Captain Thursby massively outnumber the surviving clerics, the balance of church and state power in this new settlement is decidedly less even than it was when the colonists first arrived in April. There's a decidedly "Frontier" feeling now as the people will have to build a home from scratch in a hostile scrubland instead of simply renovating an abandoned city. 

Just as the game was getting stale for me, this Braunstein completely shakes things up. Siegfried has lost his army, who knows what he'll do next, if he can do anything at all! Now without the mountains threatening time-jail to adventurers wanting to go into the wilderness, a whole new biome of plains and badlands and nomads and horses has opened up for fresh adventures and new discoveries. The Orcs seem interested in running a proper town, which could mean begrudging trade now that the humans are led by a less religious, more pragmatic gentleman. The Spongs are out of the jungle and much closer to everyone else, what will they do? How will new boats from the old world respond to this? The stasis of the gameworld has been completely shaken up and re-organised, and all it cost me was spending a beautiful sunny afternoon hanging out outside with my friends (What a bargain!)

Faction orders have been moved to a bi-weekly instead of weekly schedule to preserve my sanity. We've got some new factions cooking and previously mid-card/sideline factions like the nomads now have the "Big Happenings" much closer to home. Very excited to see how this all plays out in the coming weeks, just when things start to get steady the players can overturn everything for fun and profit. I don't think I can ever go back to conventional adventure design, this is a dynamic structure unlike anything else I've run in my career as a gamemaster. #ThankYouJeffro

OD&D Session 013-014: Playing Catchup

    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...

OD&D Session 12: Yet Another Snake Cult

     This should catch us up before the game this evening. An eventful session, but one of primarily intrigue and scheming as opposed to danger and adventure. Sets the stage for a lot to happen tonight, but we'll see if they can stick the landing. 

This session we had:

    - Bard the Cleric 3

    - Blony Tair the M-U 2

    - Han the Thief 4

    - Akaviri the MU-2 (Elf)

    - Seamus the Fighter 3

    - Brockhaus the Dwarf Fighter 1

Concerning the New Snake Cult

I swear these guys keep cropping up

    The party was offered substantial reward for finding the location of Siegfried the Wizard a few sessions ago by the Vampire Ramsugra. The pursuit of magic items was high on the priority list for Han the Thief, who in a bold move as a player elected to act directly against the interests of his faction (He plays Siegfried at the Patron Level), and set about a plan to find the wizard and cash that reward with the vampire. 

    I find it somewhat ironic that around the same time I began once again obsessing over investigative games and mystery design, the players organically initiated an investigation. Spending some time and money around looking for clues about the location of Siegfried, they came up with 3 leads:

    1. There have been sightings of Undead in the jungle north of the city

    2. A man claiming to represent Siegfried tried to hire an assassin from the thieves guild last week

    3. There have been snake symbols cropping up, carved into doorposts, under tavern tables, etc. 

    After a great deal of dead ends and cold trails, they gave up on lead two. Whoever this representative was, he has not been seen by anyone since then. Then they turned their eye to lead 3. Lead 3 led to the discovery that a new snake cult had cropped up among chaotics in the town, a secret society that met in houses late at night. Blony Tair, being a chaotic man himself, decided to go undercover and attend a meeting. What he saw there cannot be posted yet, for many secrets unfolded, but while he was there he did encounter some woodsmen who indicated where in the jungle the undead generally are seen. The party set out in the morning to find the wizards hideout. 

    They crawled through the jungle before seeing a scouting party of goblins ahead. They hit the dirt and watched, the goblins vanished from sight as though walking through an invisible wall. Han the thief snuck up to check it out, and sure enough, the goblins had passed into a patch of Hallucinatory Terrain. When Han passed through, what he saw staggered the players. There was a goblin village, with soldiers and patrols, and several cave/tunnel entrances. There, just at the base of the mountain in the centre of the village: the foundation and nearly finished first floor of a tower, being tirelessly worked on by skeleton labourers taking direction from a handful of Dwarvish supervisors. Siegfried was nowhere to be seen, but they felt confident that this was his hideout. 

    More importantly, they had to run. Han poking his head through the terrain meant that a "hostile" had hit the illusion and it was dispelled. Not immediately noticed, but soon the alarm was sounded and the party booked it back to town, got aboard a boat and paddled upriver to inform their undead employer. 

    Ramsugra was quite happy to receive the intel, and informed the party that their rewards would arrive to them in a few days, pending confirmation of the intel. Han attempted to negotiate immediate payment, the Vampire was unflappable. Several members leveled up with the experience they received from the magic items, and as the session wound down they started talking about how they were going to go about assassinating Lord Barotha. That is going to attempted tonight, and I have to prepare some things before the session, so I will let this be the end of the post and I look forward to writing up what happens this evening! Stay tuned!

OD&D Session 011: Force Multiplication

     I've been behind on my logging here, had some REAL WORLD obligations in the last 2 weeks that needed my attention. I'll keep these next 2 posts fairly brief, just to catch everything up to the report that I'll have to write tomorrow, as if everything goes according to plan the players will have succeeded in their attempt to beat the Bdubs Elite Player Challenge tonight. But faction orders are spicy this week, and a lot is going to start happening really soon. So without further ado:

Thursday Night Procedural Dungeon Crawl June 13

    This was a quick little online session with two guys, Thargaret Matcher the Fighter and Claus the Fighter. Thargaret had shelled out for some good advertising and went in with a fairly healthy contingency of men-at-arms (precise details elude my memory). Soon this won't be viable, as the third level of the dungeon is as far as these mercenaries are willing to go, but for now the moral of this story is "Having more dudes is a force multiplier, which is why armies are made up of lots of dudes instead of not a lot of dudes".

    The crawl had two major moments:

    1. An illusory wall hid a giant spider which went down in a single combat round after I rolled 8hp on 6 hit dice. Pain. 

    2. The party found a wyvern locked in a chamber on the second dungeon level. Why is it there? How did it get there? These are questions I'm cooking answers for as we speak. The point is that the party emerged in full force and through overwhelming numbers and careful attacker rotation took down the wyvern with minimal casualties. Thargaret and Claus collected it's poison gland, and checked for treasure. When determining treasure, I let the players roll the % chance for the various categories, and today this procedure had Thargaret's player swearing off virtual dice forever, as despite reasonable chances of gold, gems, and jewelry, all they got was a few thousand copper pieces. Shame!

    This was basically the bulk of the adventure, as a good amount of time was committed to debating whether or not they could fight the wyvern. I'm glad they did, though flying creatures have much less in the way of advantage in an underground environs. 

    Next post will cover the regular IRL from Wednesday, June 19, where INTRIGUE and SCHEMES began to boil over. 

Mystery Design 001: The Fake McCoys

 

   I am trapped, unable to escape the looming spectre of crime fiction that hangs over my psyche like a guillotine. Maybe, just maybe, this will be my undoing, it will destroy my ability to run games and I will go mad in the pursuit of making investigation compatible with genuine player agency. All I know is that for whatever reason, the genre has been held hostage by some absolutely terrible advice and core ideas of game design. I have rambled extemporaneously about my initial thoughts on this subject over on Youtube, and it is here that I will structure more cogent and specific arguments for the core problem with the genre as it has been thus far handled. 

    These first few posts will contend directly with the most common advice given to new referees running the game by the most visible and accessible platform: Youtube. It is here that gamemasters running games such as D&D will go to get advice for their first foray into having their players sleuth about. I watched the top 10 or so videos of "How to Run a Mystery Game". I took some bullet notes on them, but for the sake of brevity we are going to cover just 5 of them, especially considering that there is massive overlap across these channels (Almost like everyone in RPGs is just regurgitating the same ideas over and over and over again or something). Without further ado:

Professor Dungeon Master

    Professor DM makes his video fairly explicitly about running a mystery in D&D or other similar fantasy games, so the advice is coloured accordingly. There is an bit about how, because he likes running mysteries, he barres certain spells from being taken by player characters that could make the investigation less exciting (Speak to Dead, Read Thoughts, etc.). The idea being that if he wishes to include a mystery in the campaign, the offending character abilities are already dealt with. This is extremely common advice and frankly I get it. It's very easy to say "Just design your crime around a killer who knows to work around these spells", but this gets tiresome and arbitrary quickly, and if you are going to stonewall the use of a player ability anyway, may as well not include it. 

    He then brings up Chekhov's Gun as a way to illustrate that extraneous details should not be given to the players. If there is something in a room, it needs to be pertinent to The Plot (get ready to hear about The Plot a lot). So if there is a fireplace there needs to be a clue in it, if there is a painting on the wall there needs to be a clue in it, and so forth. This is, frankly, awful advice. If everything that gets described to you as a player is relevant to the plot, you create the weird artificial feeling to the world where not only everything that happens, but everything that exists only does so to serve the needs of the players and the story they are in. This breaks immersion and limits player options, and ironically ensures that the players are denied the ability to pull their own "Chekhov's Gun" maneuvers. One of the great joys of being a player is catching some throwaway detail that the GM includes to add flavour to a scene and utilizing it to your own advantage. When entering the dungeon the GM describes a tattered standard hanging on the wall, its just dressing, it doesn't have any important significance. But a player later using it as a cloth for an impromptu bandage, or to extend their rope a little further, or setting it on fire to smoke out the room, these sorts of spontaneous player actions are a big part of what makes the game fun. Insisting that all details are relevant to The Plot commits the sin of a foregone intended outcome (We call this a Railroad). 

    Something that did confuse me is that he uses an example from The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh to illustrate an example of "irrelevant details". There is a room on the first floor of the house that has plaster on the floor and the ceiling seems weak. Professor DM suggests that this sort of information will simply stall the game as the players poke around at non-essential data. But this example is a baffling choice, as the plaster on the floor and the weak ceiling is itself a clue, letting the players know that the floor in the rooms above are weak and potentially hazardous. This room is a telegraph for crafty players to be more prepared when they enter Rooms 14 and 15, where the floor can give out on them when they first encounter Ned, a key player in the mystery of the house. Saltmarsh was one of the first modules I played as a young lad, and this detail popped into mind immediately, I remember us carefully testing the floor on the second story of the house because of the data we received from this very room!

    He doubles down on this philosophy for NPCs, suggesting things like handouts to remind PCs who is important or avoiding talking in-character as non-relevant NPCs. Not only does this continue to reinforce the artificial feel of the scenario, casting the spotlight only on the things which will drive The Plot forward. This is not a living campaign world, this is a video game with select Essential NPCs.

    He then brings up the Gumshoe method of simply giving players the clues they need. This method has long been touted as the Killer App of mystery design, because it keeps the game from grinding to a halt when an important clue is not found. I have a lot of strong opinions about this, and I won't be expounding on them too much. I have intentions of addressing Gumshoe directly in another post, and also because this philosophy will come up again in the other entries on this list. Suffice to say, this is more railroading. This is no different than a DM in a fantasy game telling the adventurers exactly where they need to go and what they need to do to get the McGuffin and Kill the BBEG. It's a theme-park ride, where the players are simply being led through a series of rooms where they are told more details about the mystery until the reveal of The Climax. I said this in my video, but it really seems like investigation games are still trapped in the mindset of "Playing through a story" while fantasy games have figured out that trying to recreate the events of a Dragonlance Novel is not good game design. 

    He does, when talking about giving them the clues, produce a premise that is strikingly similar to something Brian Renninger posted the other day. He suggests that if the players fail a roll on finding a key clue, instead of having them fail to find the clue, have it take longer to do so. The Call of Cthulhu example is Library Use. If the information is there in the library and a competent academic can find it, and the real question becomes "How Long Will It Take?". Brian makes a similar proposal in his article, where certain skills have a duration cost correlated to the dice roll rather than a simple pass/fail gate. There's a lot of potential here, but I would note that this only matters if the passage of time is consistent and non-arbitrary, otherwise Time is just a magic button the GM can use to punish and reward players, rather than a meaningful resource to be used or preserved according to player intention. 

    Finally, he recommends some modules that are in the genre, but frankly this is irrelevant to the task at hand. The issue with almost all the advice in this video is apparent: The best way to run a mystery adventure is to carefully keep the players on the rails and whenever possible trick them into not noticing this. In the next post we will deal with the advice given by Baron de Ropp on his channel Dungeon Masterpiece.

OD&D Session 010: Humiliated by My Own Dice

     Last night saw the longest combat encounter to date, a staggering 15 rounds broken up into 8 and 7 round brawls respectively, with a small reprieve in the middle. Lotta dice, a lotta deeply PATHETIC rolls from my Chessex set when I was trying to kill the PCs, I will not be using them anymore. Only Gamescience is good enough for me now.

The Plan:

    The players spent some time and money asking around, wondering if anyone had heard of any lucrative rumors. Two came up, some trolls have been seen in the mountains up in Gnome Country, and the Swamp People envoys last week spoke of a wizard in the jungle north of their swamp territory. After much deliberation, the party elected to go troll-hunting. Rolling with a pack of men-at-arms and lair-busting has been very profitable for them, and they like their odds better this way. They loaded up on torches and oil flasks, bought some mules to haul things for them up into the mountains, and set off. On this expedition we had:

1. Dobias, an elf back for his third (NOT SECOND) session of D&D ever

2. James, the fighter with 5 heavy foot and 5 mules

3. Boros the Dwarf, played by the same guy as Akaviri the Elf

4. Sir Gerric the Elf, with 2 heavy foot and 5 mules

5. Figel Narage the Neutral Cleric, with 2 heavy foot and 1 archer

6. Yon the Elf, with 3 heavy foot and 2 archers

    21 men all together, enough to handle small packs but any real warband met in the wilds would need to be avoided. They set off into the wilds in search of trolls and the associated troll cave full of loot.

The Journey:

    They had a few random encounters as they ventured, but in all cases they hid, moved along, or otherwise avoided contact (easy to do in the jungle when encounter distances are up to 240 yards away!). Because of their judicious application of the better part of valour, we will cover them only briefly as they provide world-data, but not play-data yet:

    - On day one they came across a hunting party of ape-like proto-humans. Protruding brows, simian mouths, long hairy arms, these men were not at their home camp, but gathered around a fire eating some kind of roast game. The party retreated into the night and slept without a fire well away from them. 

    - On day three they had to hit the dirt, hiding in the foliage of the jungle as a green dragon circled overhead. The surprise mechanic is such an elegant way of handling stealth I don't know why it got canned from future editions. But it has been established: there is a dragon living somewhere in these hills and this means that there is dragon-treasure somewhere in these hills. The players agree to a vow of secrecy, to tell nobody about this. 

The Trolls:

    On day 5, at around 3 in the afternoon, they found the troll lair. A cave in the side of a mountain, overlooking the sagebrush flats where Pabal the Wizard dwells, outside which sat a hideous troll, surveying the landscape. The searching took longer than they anticipated, and having already crossed the threshold that would put them in time jail for next week's session, the decided to take their time. They set up a watch and simply observed the cave mouth for a few hours. At 5pm the sitting troll returned to his cave, and at 5:30 3 other trolls lumbered out and headed down the mountain towards the sagebrush. It was at this moment the party mobilized to fight. It was at this moment that I was betrayed. 

    The thing with the troll in OD&D is that despite having 6+3 HD, it only gets one regular attack per round. Pair this with a brutal string of very bad rolls from my Chessex set and it turned what could have been a massacre for the trolls turned into the trolls getting massacred. As the party squared off against two, then two more trolls that came as reinforcements, they ended up having a relatively easy time of it. When I rolled the HP for the first 3 trolls, I saw so many 1s and 2s! One troll, despite having 6HD, only had 9 hitpoints! Unforgivable! The party made judicious use of flaming-oil molotovs to keep the trolls from regenerating. 

    We use side-based initiative, and the rule is that the player who rolls for the PCs keeps rolling each round until he loses initiative to me, the DM. The duty of "Initiative Roller" passes around the table clockwise, in theory to concentrate the task into whichever player seems to be luckiest. Well, last night Yon's player beat me in initiative SEVEN ROUNDS IN A ROW before losing to me and passing the initiative die on to Sir Gerric. I persistently rolled lower than 8 on my attack rolls. It was horrible. All I wanted was 2-3 PC deaths, really make them pay for their treasure, but NO they cakewalked me! Terrible. After killing 4 trolls they retreated outside the cave, to set up an ambush for the hunting party that went out earlier (And to get out of the smoke-filled cavern and its stench of burning trollflesh.)

    The 3 trolls that rolled out at 5:30 returned at midnight, and having smelled the smoke and manflesh on the air, attempted to sneak up on the party. Despite successfully evading ALL THREE watchmen from the adventurers, and managing to ambush them from ALL SIDES, I didn't land a SINGLE attack in the surprise round. My life is ruined. In the ensuing melee the party lost a few men-at-arms, but the PCs got away unscathed and killed the three returning trolls and the last one hiding in the cave. They plundered the place and set off back for home. 

    I will say that rolling for lair treasure live at the table is a great treat, I've done it since I ran 5e. Telling the players to roll d100s for each category, having them quarrel over who gets what afterwards, great fun. The players walked away with a good haul of silver and gold pieces, some gems, and two magic items:

    - Figel Narage has acquired a Ring of Invisibility (Woo!)
    - Dobias has claimed a -2 cursed sword (Yikes!)

Afterthoughts:

    The party is plotting and scheming to assassinate Lord Barotha in hopes of creating a power vacuum that will boil over into a Braunstein, pitting humans against the elvish aristocracy that runs things. But they fear that they aren't "Powerful" enough to get away with it, and want to get some sessions in doing lair-busting to level up. We'll see if they can meet the deadline! 

    Gave Dobias' player a ride home after, asked him how he likes the game. My brother and I have known him since we were kids, but this is really his first foray into RPGs. I was very pleased to hear how intuitively he grasped the 1:1 time, if a person doesn't have Conventional Play presuppositions it really is a simple and approachable concept. I do have to brush up on some setting material, he had a lot of questions about the gameworld and the motivations of people therein, and much of this is stuff that I haven't figured out or nailed down yet! 

    We have onboarded more factions, and orders are rolling in with loads of espionage, preparation, and diplomacy. I cannot reveal many details as it stands, to preserve the fog of war, but the things that are simmering now will almost certainly boil over when the next Braunstein occurs. I eagerly look forward to being able to spill the beans on the schemes of my faction and patron players when this occurs. The campaign is picking up steam and I have to be careful not to let it get in the way of my IRL obligations. The energy is palpable, the frenetic enthusiasm undeniable!

OD&D Session 009: Ancient Aliens

 This was a quick little crawl in the dungeon beneath Dschungelberg Keep I ran online last Thursday. Just two players, and the session was beset on all sides by terrible dangers (My children were uncooperative at bedtime). But once we actually got down to play, it was a busy session to say the least!

Take One: Common Pitfalls

    The crew set out with Tnk (Pronounced "Tank") the Elf and Olaf the Cleric. They each had 5 men-at-arms for a clean dozen men delving down into the dungeon. Now, it should be noted that for the online games where players have been crawling the Dschungelberg dungeon, I've been procedurally generating it using Appendix A and some handy-dandy Abduction. So these sessions really are an analogue rogue-like with the dungeon being generated as it is explored. It's been a very good time to say the least.

    So the party set off down to Level 1, stopping off at the one room they've never entered. Almost immediately a pit-trap with spikes culled several of their men-at-arms and nearly killed the two PCs. This was the 6th pit-trap that had been generated on this floor of the dungeon. The dice are a cruel mistress sometimes. They went back up to hire more men, to replenish their numbers, and returned for a new delve. Getting down to the 2nd level of the dungeon, they poked around at some empty rooms, negotiated passage with a cluster of kobolds who did NOT want to tangle with the much larger party of adventurers, and discovered a hidden passage that leads first to the cistern that the keep's well lowers into and then into a room full of 20 brigands! The party, almost certain that they have uncovered a smugglers ring, run some fast talk and good reaction rolls into getting to leave without an altercation. Pressing onward, the dice were ONCE AGAIN a cruel mistress.

    Not to the players, mind you. To ME, the poor beleaguered DM, all I want is for the Appendix to give me some of the cool, punitive, EVIL traps from the Tricks/Traps table. But instead of darts, or a covert elevator that plummets them to a deeper level, the party encountered another pit trap. BORING!!!! This one killed both PCs and several more men-at-arms. Technically speaking, the first TPK of the campaign! We were only about 30 minutes in and I had just hit my stride getting into the flow of running, so I asked if they were done for the night or if they wanted to roll up new characters and try again.

Take Two: Just Another Snake Cult

    After I went and re-tucked the kids in, got back to my desk and the players had whipped up a new party. Claus the Fighter has been here before, and the other player generated the first thief of the campaign, Han. They rustled up some men-at-arms and set down into the dungeon. It was broadly uneventful for much of the evening, in part because the appendix was giving us a lot of long, empty hallways. But not so fast! Some of the table results saw me have an opportunity to connect this dungeon to the other one thematically. 

    The adventurers came across a stretch of hallway, straight with one door after the other. The walls in the final stretch were of polished black stone, and the final door was ornately carved brass. The players heard chanting on the other side of the door. They burst in, a group of emaciated men in loincloths were worshiping at an altar covered in various treasures, and on the ground before the altar: a truly enormous sarcophagus. The décor and atmosphere had noticeable overlap with the snake cultists that have been encountered in the Library of Shuga-Koth. These cultists, unlike the ones in the library, had human heads instead of snake heads. They were no less hostile though, and they drew their Thulsa Doom Snake Daggers and attacked. They were no match for the PCs, and the room was soon being looted. 

    There was a few magic items on the altar, some gems and coinage. But the real treasure was in the sarcophagus. The mummified corpse therein had a huge aztec-style death mask and serpentine jewelry. It was 7 and a half feet tall, with distended fingers, sharp teeth and an elongated skull. 

Looting this guy will not have any far-reaching consequences

    

    Han plundered the Acheronian corpse and the party headed back to the surface to sell their loot and cash in the XP. At first I did a double-take, thinking there was no way this much XP could fall in the hands of the players from a single session. And then I remembered that instead of being divided between 6-9 players, it was instead being divided up among 2. Suffice to say, Han sling-shotted his way to Level 4 in a single session (OD&D has no prescriptions for training or slowing the rate of advancement) and Claus made out pretty darn well himself. They sold the mummy's loot to a suspicious broker who claimed to have a buyer lined up. We'll see how this plays out. Mummy treasure never has any consequences for taking it anyway.