Dschungelberg Session 007: It's Quiet.... Too Quiet...

     Extremely quick little excursion into the dungeon beneath Dschungelberg Keep with just me and my godfather, he rolled up with a party of 5 dudes:

- Olaf, Eckhardt, and Moldof the clerics

- Gavin and Claus the fighting-men

    Something that happens when you run the traditional dungeon-crawl for a single player controlling a party of characters is everything is more efficient. Without multiple cooks in the kitchen to mull and discuss about what to do next, things move very quickly. The crew entered the dungeon and spent 6 consecutive turns exploring, mapping the place out, and looking for monsters and treasure. They found none. They came across a staircase leading up, not to the main floor of the keep, but all the way up to a secret door into the master quarters, where they found Elf-Lord Barotha Carvalloman deeply inebriated and screaming for the guards "HELP ASSASSINS HELP HELP" 

    After being politely escorted back to the dungeon by some very tired looking guards the crew came across a room which was full of treasure, but also protected by a pitfall trap. Poor Eckhardt didn't make it. They decided to hide the treasure (6k in value) and venture down to the second level. I had not prepared the second level, so we engaged in some Appendix A on-the-fly dungeon generation. Another 4-5 exploration turns went by, not a single monster (Random encounters can be fickle dice!). It was downright eerie. 

    Finally, after much poking around, they came across 8 angry goblins in a long corridor. They fought valiantly, but after Gavin bought a farm they decided to bravely run away. They were pursued for a bit but managed to shake them (Still working out exactly how pursuit in OD&D is supposed to work...). The three survivors took their treasure and headed back to the surface, levelling up with the 3-way split of the treasure. The player was not sure what to do with 2000 gold laying around, and I suggested that one such use would be to hire some 200 men-at-arms for a proper wilderness adventure. We'll see what he does next week, but for now this was all we were going to do. 

    Simple, very simple, but I look at how much actual ground and exploration got covered in this 90 minute session and there is no doubt in my mind it would have taken a group of players 2 or even 3 hours to accomplish the same! What a single player lacks in the social pleasures of D&D, the table-talk, the kibitzing, the character dynamics, he makes up for in unity of mind and focus of play. Very efficient, but a totally different experience from running for 3-9 players as I typically do. 

OD&D Session 006: Wizards in the Purple Sage

     This one is coming in almost a week late (We played last Wednesday), but better late than never. The party elected to go out into the wilderness and do some scouting, though I warned them that wilderness encounters are meaner than dungeon encounters and they should come prepared. This produced a problem, as I took the existence of multiple available player characters as license for my players to bring more than one "Levelled" PC per player. Out of Character, this makes fine sense, more firepower is more useable. Additionally, when running games for just one player I often let them roll up a whole party. In a table dynamic, this produces problems under the question of division of loot. The question of "Does loot divide by character or by player?" has never come up, as the number of players and the number of characters receiving loot (And therefore EXP) was a 1:1 ratio. If it is divided by player, we break verisimilitude. Why would Gromnil the Barbarian and Fikklbod the Dwarf accept a smaller cut, simply because they are both controlled by the same non-diegetic Elder Being (Player)? However, if it is by character, then the decision to bring an extra character increases the amount of exp going to one player and diminishing the amount going to every other player. This creates a game incentive where unless every single player is bringing 2 characters, the table is encouraged against doing this, or can develop sour feelings towards an ambitious player who tries to bring an entourage of PCs. 

    Suffice to say, this tension resulted in some table conflict towards the end of the session, and going forward the table has decided that the rule is to be "One Levelled Character per Player". If you wish to bring a henchman and see him gain loot and experience, this must come from your main characters cut. Henches and NPC's are not entitled to any compensation beyond what the PC who hired them is willing to offer from his own pockets. Despite this friction with learning this new (old) style of play, the session was nonetheless very well executed by the party and they made some great gains and progress. So, without further ado:

INTO THE WILD

    I finally took the time to use the DMG to populate my surrounding region's hexmap, and discovered some very interesting things. First, the town is surrounded on all sides by mountains and jungle. The town now has a name, Dschungelberg (Junglemountain). More intriguing is that north of these mountains and jungle is a surprisingly large region of plains, scrub, and rocky badlands. I'm interpreting this as the point of arrival for the colonial expedition being less analogous to Peru or Brazil, and more to a region with a gradient of verdant growth similar to the range in the gulf of Mexico, from Yucatan to Corpus Christi. As a lifetime enthusiast for the Western, I'm never going to pass up a table result that lets me put sagebrush flats in my gameworld. 

Marching into the mountains north of Dschungelberg we have quite a posse (Clustered together by player):

- Manfred the Cleric and Gerric the Elf

- Seamus the Fighter, Dean the Fighter, 5 heavy foot and 5 archers

- Yon the Elf and Tnk the Elf, 2 heavy foot, 2 elven heavy foot, and 1 elf archer

- James and Jack the fighters

- Thorp Windrop and Blony Tair the Magic-Users

- Brockhaus the Dwarf, 3 elven archers

    The party covered a lot of ground, so the encounters will be largely described in brief. While in the mountains, they came across a travelling convoy of gnomes, nearly 300 heads strong. The party avoided them entirely, so where the convoy was headed or if the gnomes were friendly remains un-gnown. Later they encountered a hunting party of a dozen hairy men who (12 on the reaction roll!) shared some rations with the adventurers, warned them that the gnomes are mad about something and ought to be avoided, and finally spoke in vague euphemism about why they were so far south, away from their people, isolated in the mountains. Maybe this will be investigated further, maybe it won't, but the players certainly thought it sounded like exile. They were unable to find much of anything in the way of treasure, so the party decided to push north one more day before heading home (The extra rations from the hunters enabled this ambition). 

    They came out the other side after days in the mountains to a huge sagebrush flat. The north face of the mountains was dry and arid compared to the cool and humid south face, and the party set out to do some hunting and scouting of the sage. They didn't catch any food, but they did get a wizard on the encounter table. Some good reaction rolls and some #zeroprep improvisation from the DM later and we found our heroes in the secret underground tower of Pabal of Eolor, a friendly if certainly insane wizard who claims to have been a citizen of the original Dschungelberg colony some 130 years ago. He doesn't seem to be an elf, but the party was unable to deduce the source of his longevity. When invited back to town, he frowned and said he was not able to venture far from his home, but that he was happy to see them whenever they are in the area. 

    Pabal gave them some intel on a nearby lair, since this is what the party was looking for in the first place, and the dice did smile on them. In the foothills of the mountains Pabal knew there to be a cave housing a group of hobgoblins. He used to do business with them against the local orc clans, but relations have soured in recent months and they have been causing problems for his research. When rolling to answer the question of "No. Appearing: 20-200" I rolled 2d10x10 and got double 1s. A lair containing only 20 hobs is just as likely to have a motherlode of loot as a lair of 200, and fortune was with the players today. They set up an ambush near the hob lair using a campfire, hiding among the sagebrush waiting to strike, but this ran into problems as the hobs had the same idea, and as they crept around the campfire to surround the bait-men and ambush them, they stumbled right into the hiding adventurers. Nonetheless, short work was made of the wretched demihumans and the party set about to loot the place. 

    Some good rolls on the jewelry tables meant that while no magic items were found, the party was sitting on ~15,000 gold value of treasure. They packed up James' mule with the goods and set off back to town, with some helpful navigation instructions from the hairy hunting party. On the road they saw a pair of basilisks in the distance, but avoided direct contact, and things were almost in the clear. Only one problem, Thorp Windrop had been scheming to get more of the treasure for himself, and fomented a mutiny among the men-at-arms, who deemed a cut from 15k was certainly more than the monthly wage they were receiving. This was the first instance of hirelings failing a loyalty check, and the resultant combat saw Thorp and his band of mutineers butchered. What they had not accounted for was that by striking in the night, while people were in bed, the elves would be out of their armour and free to cast the spells they had memorised for this adventure. Yon, with his trap-card activated, cast Sleep and rendered the rest of the combat something of a cake-walk for the heroes. The wages paid to the men-at-arms were collected from their corpses and added to the loot value, and the heroes got back to town in breezy good health, with almost nobody injured. 

    Next week is the first "Patch" getting added to the game, with Greyhawk material being added. While some are excited for the addition of Paladins, I am most enthused about the arrival of thieves (Who I love dearly) and percentile Strength (The best part of AD&D by a wide margin). Tonight I have an online game with my godfather, we shall see what he decides to get up to!

OD&D Session 005: Remy's Got Hands

 Ran a game online today, I haven't done this for a group in a long time, but it felt great to just clock in for a little 2-hour dungeon crawl after the chaos and cognitive load of the Braunstein. The party wanted to check out the dungeon that was discovered beneath the newly-taken keep. 

Tabletop Simulator for the Win

We had 4 characters:

1. Clovis the Cleric (Not to be confused with the other Cleric named Clovis)

2. Tnk (Pronounced "tank") the Elf

3. Ander the Fighter

4. Olaf the Cleric

    Things were kept fairly straightforward, there isn't a lot to tell. The players came across a large set of double-doors, wherein a pit trap killed Ander. Because the dungeon is beneath the keep, so travel time is negligible, the party fell back, found another fighter (Andrew) and returned to keep delving. They came across another party of adventurers who were on their way out, warning them of flesh-eating undead in one area of the dungeon. The players decided that area was probably already looted, and went in a different direction. They came across a statue-fountain of an ape-man playing the lyre. Fishing around in the dried silt of the fountain bowl they found some paltry coinage, petty gems and a brass bracelet in the shape of a snake eating it's own tail. 

    Delving further they found a tapestry of ape-men fighting orcs, and a large square pillar with a rusty iron cage at the top. Flanking the pillar were three doors, all with stairs leading down. This was not investigated further. They found a torture chamber and a wine-cellar room with some barrels of very good, very aged wine (Cha-Ching!). Most interestingly, though, was a bare room with an arcanely-carved archway in the center. The archway radiated cold, like it had been in a freezer for months. The elvish script was antiquated by Tnk was able to discern the words "Home" and "Warmed by the Blood". After some experimentation, he applied some of his own blood to the archway, which hummed and absorbed the blood like a sponge. It produced steam like dry ice, and inside the arch in the steam Tnk saw spectral images and shapes of his family estate back in the Old World. Erring on the side of caution, they chose to leave this artefact alone for the time being. 

    The final room of the evening was an archive of census data, shipping manifests, court rulings, and the like from when the keep was still governing over an imperial city. The party rightly concluded that this was information that might be worth some reward to the authorities, but first:

    The fight with giant rats in the archive should have been a cakewalk, but the dice have a sense of humour, and there was one rat who managed to kill Andrew, nearly kill Tnk and Clovis, and generally survive and deal far more damage than he had any right to. Very amusing. Reduced to almost no hitpoints, the party elected to cut their losses and head back to the surface. 

    This session was interesting because it lasted only 2 hours, much shorter than our usual IRL game, and was very easy to run. I suspect that more games like this will crop up, I can see myself treating low-level excursions the way many people treat video games, if I have an evening free and my friends wanna hang online, we can hop into TTS and get some stuff done. The 1:1 calendar will be helpful with this, keeping everything consistent and moving at a standard, non-arbitrary pace. Overall I am greatly looking forward to this particular arena of play in conjunction with the regular, much larger in-person sessions. 

OD&D Session Report 004: Fortress Orkmerica

     This was huge. What was intended to be a small-scale experiment in a new way of playing turned into a huge 6.5 hour event that radically altered both the campaign world and the way I think about managing my game. Thank you Jeffro! 

    My Gameworld had a problem. The campaign was intended to be a colonial excursion to reclaim a lost city and re-establish the imperial presence in this foggy, equatorial New World. But the abandoned city they came to retake was not really abandoned. It was occupied with ORCS. Initially my intention had been to have this be the first "dungeon" to clear, reclaiming the city via raiding by adventurers. But then I realized that this was a STUPID idea. An imperial expedition with hundreds of soldiers, a high-level wizard and a great big mortar would not leave the taking of a city to 10-15 men raids! I was foolishly letting my presuppositions about how to play D&D colour my intentions for how the game would play out. What made much more sense was to have a wargaming event that would adjudicate how this was all gonna go down. I needed a Braunstein. So I look at the map. 

    The only relevant parties that are relevant to this conflict are the orcs holding the ruined city and the expeditionary force. Two players does not an interesting conflict make, methinks. Fortunately, I had already established three smaller factions within the expeditionary force to explain the presence of different player options, namely some mercenaries, a holy order, and a research detachment from the wizards university. Three smaller factions up against a single entrenched faction made me think fondly of Fortress America, one of the better Risk-Style board games on the market. Thus, Fortress Orkmerica was born. 

America is even green in the classic game!

    

FACTION LEADERS

Barotha Carvalloman: The fickle elvish aristocrat making all of this possible, he did not engage directly with the invasion and remained on the ship, doing who knows what. Nonetheless, his money and legitimate authority will be relevant when the game approaches its end, so it is worth it to mention him. 

Osman Rausch: Head of the mercenary company, commanding a few hundred men, split roughly even between heavy and armoured foot, as well as a small detachment of elvish archers and a mortar. His objectives? Seize the keep and drive the orcs out. Failing that, his secondary objective was to establish a proper siege camp and starve the orcs out. He was the only player on the imperial side who did not have objectives at odds with his allies. 

Archpriest Gilderoy Loutherbourg: A cleric with a small detachment of holy warriors and some peasants. His objective was to take control of the abandoned church in town and fortify it against further attack. His secondary objective was to make Siegfried's apprentices "disappear". Fr. Loutherbourg is secretly aware of Vemmelmordt's Chaotic and Necromantic ways, but on account of the wizard's favour with Lord Carvalloman, cannot confront him directly. 

Siegfried von Vemmelmordt: 11th level magic-user with two 2nd level apprentices. His primary objective? Take control of the church before Gilderoy does in order to gain access to the ossuary beneath. Plenty of bones to animate down there. Barring this outcome, he intends to kill Gilderoy so that the power vacuum causes enough confusion that he can do "research" in the catacombs without pesky clerics bothering him about "desecration of the dead" and "violation of natural law". This is all part of his larger scheme, to raise enough undead and enslave enough orcs that he can establish himself permanently and safely in the Library of Shuga-Koth. 

Big Chief Gorkamoley: The leader of a large contingent of orcs holding the city, he had three warchiefs working under him to help manage the troops. Teefeata, Bonesmasha, and MOGMOGMOG all had different unique abilities pertaining to troop morale, but in the event of no warchief present orcs would have to check morale before doing anything, per the peasant rules in Chainmail. Gorkamoley was supposed to be played by the DM of the other game our group plays (A wonderful frontier-based hexcrawl in fantasy Canada) but personal affairs rendered him unavailable. Stepping in to save the day, one of the regular players from my game. I was initially hesitant to let a player see the inner workings of the "bad guys" he would normally be fighting against, but then I realized this was dumb and I needed to have some faith that my friend would be able to separate the two and play fairly. He had very simple goals: kill humans, keep them out. He was a great choice for this role as he is very familiar with Fortress America, especially as an America player and was more than comfortable with the asymmetric 3v1 setup of this game. The Orcs were mostly composed of light foot, which will normally get eviscerated in melee with armoured and heavy foot. To offset this, I gave him the ability to send a unit into the jungle. In 1d6 days it would return with 2d6 units of light foot, and if this 2d6 roll contained a 1 this would refer instead to an ogre. He asked how many times he could do this, I said 3d6 (we rolled a 13) he sent all of them on day one. 

It was a beautiful day, we gamed with the garage open all afternoon

    Prior to initiating the first turn I met with each player 1-on-1 to cover any questions they had about their data sheet, objectives, and to get an idea of what they were going to attempt first. Did this while working the BBQ, so when I was done we had a batch of burgers ready to go. Lunch was eaten, cold ones were cracked, and the game began.

TURN ONE: May 11th

    The turns were structured as being a 24 hour period, from dawn to dawn. The team sent a small detachment to take the beach, and scout the area. Fr. Gilderoy used "Speak with Plants" and "Speak with Animals" to gather intel about the orcs. The trees said "Big Chief sends runners into the jungle, up the mountain". The big chief had nearly halved his garrison sending runners out for reinforcements, a decisive assault would have ruined him. A decisive assault, however, did not come. Siegfried cast "Hallucinatory Terrain" to create a dense jungle on the beach that would obscure the arrival of the rest of the army in the following days. Big Chief Gorkamoley had his forces divided. Some were lurking in the streets of the city looking to pick off scouts. Some were in a watchtower on the perimeter of the city with an Ogre. Some were holding the keep. A small camp in the jungle just along the beach was lurking, spying the arrival of the humans (This camp was snitched on by the talking animals). MOGMOGMOG, the toughest and most brootal of all the orcs (Some say... some say even more bruutal than the Big Chief himself) was camped behind the city, poised to reinforce any area that needed it. Most interestingly though, was that Big Chief Gorkamoley was lurking deep in the jungle west of the city, and that he had more units with him than any other location. All was quiet.

TURN TWO: May 12th

    The Humans sent their detachment into the jungle to take on the orcish scouting camp, but found it completely deserted. They were able to waltz right in and take control of a watchtower along the defunct, nearly absent city wall. Rausch deployed the remainder of his troops to the beach, hidden by Siegfried's hallucinatory jungle. The orcs received reinforcements, and sent nearly all of them to Big Chief's secret camp in the western jungle. They sent a goblin to parley with the humans. 

    "His Corpulent Majesty Gorkamoley bids you welcome, and wishes more than anything else to understand why, why would you encroach on us like this? Not only have we done you no harm, we do not understand the FOOLISHNESS it would take for people as SMALL and PINK and SQUISHY as you to assault the Mighty Gorkamoley. Surely you have some reason to challenge his might despite your obvious weakness and pathetic bone density?"

    The goblin was Charmed, taken hostage and named Arnold. What Siegfried intends to do with him remains unknown. 

TURN THREE: May 13th

    In the morning, the watchtower crew surveyed the city, and the mercenaries sent scouts into the streets. However, the orcs had received orders to vanish, hide, take no hostile action and not set foot in the streets. It was an apparent ghost-town. In the afternoon, Siegfried placed new hallucinatory terrain closer to the city to hide the advancing of the army and mortar. The superstitious orcs failed some rolls and remained afraid to enter woods that seemingly appeared from thin air (Though the Orc Player did not think to actually attempt to enter these woods). The clerics cut down jungle wood and began putting up palisades on the beach to more easily protect the flank of the advancing army. They left a small cluster of troops to keep the watchtower, but sent most of the force back to link up with the main army. The day was quiet and uneventful, but the orc player had orders for after the sun set. 

    Hiding in ruined houses, lurking in the streets under cover of darkness, the orcs assaulted the now largely un-defended watchtower. War Chief Teefeata, 2 ogres and a large mob of orcs advanced on the tower. This would be the first use of Chainmail any of us have ever played, so it did take a while. We learned a couple things from this battle. Most importantly we learned that light foot, even in greatly superior numbers, gets absolutely eviscerated by armoured foot. The 5 infantry units of humans, 2 armoured and 3 heavy, ran the 15 units of light foot orcs through a meat grinder, though in the end the Ogres ended the plucky humans. Following this, and hearing the advance of human reinforcements, War Chief Teefeata and his ogres ran away to fight another day, joining up with the Big Chief. After all, even more orcs arrived from the jungle that day, and they were promptly sent to Gorkamoley's camp. A seriously large army was amassing in the jungle.

TURN 4: May 14th

    This one was for all the marbles. War Chief MOGMOGMOG got aspirations of grandeur. After all, he is surely the toughest and meanest of all the orcs! He placed Big Chief Gorkamoley's throne in the courtyard of the keep, and opened the gates, awaiting a detachment that he felt sure was going to march up main street today. Hidden behind the open doors, in the wings of the courtyard, a mob of orc heavies lead by War Chief Bonesmasha. The plan was simple, bait the humans into entering the courtyard, and then slam the doors shut, cutting the force in half and attacking those inside the keep from the flanks. An elegant, if daring, scheme. There were two things that MOGMOGMOG was not expecting in his gamble. 

1. That Osman Rausch would be marching his ENTIRE army up the main street to assault the keep. This meant that when the doors pinched the gate shut, halving the army, the courtyard would still have humans outnumbering orcs nearly 3:1. 

2.  That Osman Rausch would fire artillery directly at MOGMOGMOG on his throne before directing his troops to enter the keep. The arrogant War Chief and his immediately surrounding attendants was slain by a mortar before the fight even truly began. 

    But Bonesmasha and his men made their morale checks, and stuck to the plan. They waited, and when 9 units of armoured foot entered followed by 9 units of heavy foot, the gates were slammed shut, the humans were being attacked from the rear! The time it took the humans to about face was enough time for the orcs to tear through the heavy foot, but the armoured foot made short work of the orcs and War Chief Bonesmasha fled, scrambling over the wall with his life barely intact. 

    In a staggering display of tactical brilliance, Big Chief Gorkamoley did not bring his (At this point truly enormous) army to flank the rest of the army stuck outside the keep, so once the orcs inside were killed the humans simply opened the gate and secured the keep. But there was a question: What were the wizards up to during all this? The clerics were marching with the army, but Siegfried and his apprentices were nowhere to be seen. 

    They had gone to the church, under the cover of invisibility spells. They animated some 34 skeletons from the ossuary and set them to work barricading the doors with pews. Siegfried explained his plan of action should Fr. Gilderoy try and take the church. The plan was for him and his two apprentices to cast 3 instances of Charm Person on the leader of the clerics, and if that failed retreat into the ossuary while the doors were cleared and cast Cloudkill on the stairs. This is where things got a little bit messy.

TURN 5: May 15th

    I made a huge error and it nearly ended the game on a very sour note. Big Chief Gorkamoley realized he had lost, and moved all remaining troops to the Big Camp in the jungle. He gave me orders for the coming weeks, mostly kidnappings, assassinations and raids under cover of darkness. The city ruins once housed thousands, and now are being held by a mere 500 souls. Unable to compete with the weapons and armour tech of the expedition, the orcs intend to wage guerilla warfare and wear down the morale of the humans. More people may come from the Old World in time, but those already in the new world will live in the shadow of constant, needling threat from the jungle. 

His mass pulling of forces from the jungles and mountains did not go unnoticed, and he is not the only faction of humanoids in this misty land...

    The humans had their own problems to worry about. Fr. Gilderoy marched his men to the church, and, finding it barricaded, set about breaking in. Through peepholes, the Charm Person spells went off. He failed all three saves, or rather, he SHOULD have. I looked at the dice and got it in my head that saving throws are "Roll Under", as per another system our group used to play. He should have been completely under Siegfried's control, but I didn't convey this to the player. So the issue of cloudkill was being debated and things were getting bleak, it didn't seem like many of the clerics would get out of this situation alive. You see, the cleric player didn't know what level Siegfried was, and believed that he was out of high-grade spell slots. This was not the case, and now conversations were flying about bricking up the door to the ossuary stairs, starving him out, etc. It was at this point that I realized the error I had made.

    After discussing it with the players, we agreed to a retcon. I was fairly adamant about this, letting a result stand from a blatant inversion of what the rules should have been was not something I wanted. However, the players were somewhat invested in the political upheaval of the erroneous results. We worked out a retcon that preserved this "Cold War" endstate while still reverting the die results to be what they should have been. Play by the rules! Do not fudge dice!

The End-State of the Braunstein

    Gilderoy (Under magical direction), to the great protests of his acolytes, demands that Siegfried be left to his devices in the ossuary, and that no one is to enter or leave it without his permission. His underlings are furious, and suspect corruption on the part of their superior. Worse, we decide we need to figure out what Lord Carvalloman's opinion of all this is. I get curious, and roll up what spells he has access to as an 8th level magic-user. In a freak outcome of the dice, well over half of his spellbook coincides directly with the spells Siegfried has. It was established early in the game that the Elf-Lord considers Siegfried a dear friend, but this was compounded now by the implication that Siegfried likely tutored the Elf in the ways of magic. It was extremely unlikely that secular authourity would intervene on behalf of the  Unwilling to face the powerful wizard on their own or oppose their ecclesiastic superior, they draft a letter to the Archbishop explaining the dreadful conditions and blatant desecration occurring. Will the Inquisition be dispatched? Almost certainly. 

    Siegfried has uncovered that the ossuary is connected to a larger underground network, there is a dungeon beneath the city! He intends to find a way to surreptitiously raise, equip and relocate as many skeleton warriors as he can to the Library of Shuga-Koth, to defend him and his apprentices as they plumb the vile snake-cult secrets of that vast arcane archive. Perhaps he will use Arnold, his goblin henchman, to open up relations with the orcs, perhaps not. Most importantly, he was alive and in a secure location on the 15th, which means he was able to receive intel and dispense payment with the adventurers from Session 003's dungeon expedition. Time Paradox Evaded!

    Osman Rausch does not care if the wizard wants to poke around in the catacombs and as long as the Lord Carvalloman keeps paying he has no interest in using his mercenaries against the wizard. The vote of the war-chest vetoes any potential religious sentiments of the soldiers, at least for now. The open secret of Siegfried's necromancy remains a source of tension, but not outright conflict as things currently stand. They got what they wanted, they secured the keep and killed hundreds of orcs. Life is going pretty much exactly how they want it to. 

    This game was a blast, I had so much fun running it, and I was perpetually amazed at how the fog of war really tampers with the predictability of scenarios. More than once the movement of troops meant that, like ships in the night, two armies would evade each other without even knowing it. Looking at the state of things now, things are a powder keg in a way that would have been an enormous slog and terrible cognitive load for me to generate and track on my own as a conventional DM. We have a huge force of orcs plotting asymmetric warfare in the jungle, and despite the way that things were initially set up, we see a vision of Gorkamoley not necessarily as the strongest of the orcs but rather the smartest. Leading his force in a head-on collision with Rausch's army would have been a pyrrhic victory at best, there is just no situation were light-foot is likely to succeed against armoured foot with artillery. His uninvolvement becomes construed as a patient leader, knowing when to fold em, when to hold em, when to walk away and when to run. This makes him much more interesting as a "villain" and I never would have thought to run him this way. 

    Having the Lawful (Clerics) and Chaotic (Wizards) factions living directly on top of each other in a Cold War state is fantastic, especially considering it is the Neutral (Mercenaries) faction that is actually maintaining security and order for the rest of the town. Neutral law enforcement/security is great because they are bribable, as more people arrive from the Old World we can get some urban hijinks and corruption going on. One has to ask though, if this town is large enough to have once housed thousands, where did they all go? What happened 130 years ago that saw them all killed and cut off from their colonial parent-state? The only way to find out is to keep playing the game! 

OD&D Session 003: Ssssusssspicionss of Sssnake Cultssss

    

    This week was a doozy, there were 9, count 'em, NINE players around my table. I usually have my DM screen and notes on a separate table that stands a little above the main table, placed at the head. This is to make sure my crap doesn't eat into player space on the table, and also the elevation is nice as I prefer to run the game standing as opposed to sitting. But this week, with nine players I needed to set up my table a good five feet away from their table, so that they could all fit around it! This was the largest group of players I have ever run for and with a few quality-of-life notes that I need to account for going forward in terms of space and seating, it was excellent. 

Hell yeah

    So what went down? 

    Having paid their tithes and gotten some minor healing from the clerics, the party was ready to return to the Library of Shuga-Koth. After all, the wizard Siegfried von Vemmelmordt was still paying nicely for anyone willing to clear the place out and secure it for his research team. On the excursion we had:

Seamus the Fighter

Ivan the Fighter

Yon the Elf

Akaviri the Elf

Thargaret Matcher the Fighter

Dobias the Elf (Formerly Dobby)

Merlon the Magic-User

Corrigan the Magic-User

Bard the Cleric

    The journey up-river on May 8th to the dungeon saw NO random encounters, which is a shame because we determined the previous week that these jungles are home to a territorial wereboar, and the players had diligently acquired some silver weapons in case he showed up again. In any case, they arrived at the dungeon unscathed and fresh. Prior to devling to the second level in search of treasure, they took a pit stop at the DEFINITELY NOT CURSED MIRROR, which Seamus was devastated to find painted over in Fuligin black. The mirror was wrenched from the wall and set aside to be brought back. Seamus desired nothing more than to restore the reflective surface of the mirror and see himself in it once more. Down they went to Level 2.

    The second level was, like the upper level, clearly NOT abandoned. There was ample evidence of activity, including clean floors. Arriving at a room full of clearly-recently-used bunks, the party realized that some larger force was using this ancient temple as a base of operations. While poking around in this empty barracks the players got a random encounter "Heroes", unlikely given the "New World" feel but we rolled with it. A pair of fighters and a cleric from the expedition boat had evidently been poking around here after word got out that the players had found treasure. The interaction was terse, clearly neither group interested in sharing what they may or may not have found. The NPC party diplomatically indicated that they were heading up to the surface to head home, and I suspect they found something in the dark that they felt the need to resupply for. Something valuable but heavy. We'll see how things play out in the future. They did tell the players about a proper library chamber and gave directions. 

    The party arrived in the library chamber and it was enormous. Well over 100 feet wide and 80 feet deep, the chamber was full of high stone shelves carved from the cave itself, stuffed to the brim with ancient scrolls stored in hollow femurs. The script on these texts was swirling and serpentine, the walls adorned (like many other rooms in the dungeon) with carvings of towering snake men. And snake men did arrive, with the thorough 2-hour investigation of this chamber being interrupted by an attack from a pair of snake-headed Conjurers leading a cluster of skeleton archers and hobgoblins. Through careful use of choke-points and judicious use of flaming oil, they managed to defeat the interlopers without any casualties, though one of the wizard-cultists did ditch his flaming robe and escape. They followed his sooty footprints to a secret door. 

I assure you what happens next was amply telegraphed

    Behind the secret door they found an opulent room, snake-themed brass décor, silk pillows, a chandelier, a hookah, and absurd quantities of treasure. This was the motherlode, over 20k value in gold pieces. But they had to get it out. The room was home to something, something that had been lurking in another part of the dungeon and been called back by the fleeing, lightly toasted cultist. The party heard, though the non-secret door to the chamber, the sound of a body dragging across flagstones. This was a sound they had heard throughout the dungeon all day, and their paranoia had them cast Hold Portal on the door. This would have bought them enough time to ditch with the goods, but they underestimated their opponent and lingered long enough for the Medusa to go all the way around and come up the hall to the secret entrance. Merlon the Magic-User was the first to notice it, managing a "Hey guys heads up there's a-" before being turned to stone. 

    There was a real chance that this would have been extremely bad for them, but thanks to the warning of Merlon's demise they avoided looking the creature in the eyes. Even better, Dobias had a mirror. This turn of events not only was enough to turn the Medusa to stone, it was a ringing victory of planning for Dobias' new player, who was at that moment in his second ever game of Dungeons and Dragons. The previous week, when making a character, he had elected to purchase a mirror for reasons unknown. This sort of serendipitous preparedness was immensely exciting for the whole table and would never have been possible if using some sort of quantum inventory. The party seized their treasure, including breaking off the medusa-statue's head, and set off for home. Once again no random encounters bothered them, and they were back in town by noon on the 14th. The treasure was enough to level up the whole crew, which is just as well, because by the time we game again the state of the world will be noticeably more treacherous...

    The medusa encounter is also special because this is the first D&D roll ever made by one of my children, my daughter wanted to roll dice for me while stocking the dungeon level and she rolled a real nasty one. I couldn't be prouder!

OD&D Session 2: Exit, Pursued by a Boar

    This week the players engaged in some proper exploration. Leaving the orc-infested ruins alone for the time being, they took a contract from one of the patrons aboard the colonial expedition, Siegfried von Gemmelmordt. Siegfried is an 11-level magic-user, the highest level character, and a man who clearly looks much older than he should.

What dozens of uses of haste will do to a man

    The wizard has his own reasons for coming on this expedition. He doesn't care much about the prospective resource extraction opportunities that a restored colony would provide, he rather is interested in paying the glut of opportunistic mercenaries present on the expedition to assist him in gaining access to a particular ruined temple he has learned of. About 2-5 days upriver into the jungle he believes there to be the Library of Shuga-Koth, and he would like some chumps of lesser status to scout the place out for him. All too eager for the potential loot, the party hired some men-at-arms and set out for the dungeon. 

On the crew for this excursion:

    1. Ivan, a brand new fighter from a friend who missed last weeks session

    2. Akavir, an elf played by the same guy who played Clovis last week

    3. Dobby, an elf played by another new player

    4. Seamus, the farm-boy fighter from last week, healed up and ready for more

    5. Yon the elf, also returning from last week. 

    Both Yon and Seamus have hired men-at-arms (2 archers and 3 heavy foot each) for this expedition, though Yon paid extra for elvish soldiers, and paid them double in an attempt to improve their loyalty rating. We'll see how this pans out for them. 

    The trip to the dungeon was broadly uneventful, no random encounters beset them as they paddled up the river, and at the end of the third day they arrived at the temple. It was carved from the face of a cliff overlooking the river like Petra, and the party felt unsure about sleeping near it, so they made camp on the opposite side of the river. During first watch that night, 13 ghouls came up as a random encounter. Encounter distances in the wilderness are quite far, with the ghouls being 200 yards away from camp, coming up on them along the riverbank. The party bravely decided to scramble into their boats and go over to the other side of the river. The ghouls looked at the party, looked at the river, looked at the temple, and slipped back into the jungle.

"Ok ya you guys have fun in there"

    Far from being frightened by the way the ghouls seemed afraid of the temple, the party decided to camp out in its looming shadow with the hope that it would scare off any other nasty foes. In the morning, they approached the dungeon. Entering into the main chamber, there were 5 doors to contend with. True to form (My players have a system), they went straight for the closest door to the left of them. Inside were 12 kobolds, 4 of whom scrambled away, for purposes unknown. The remaining 8 fought bravely, and even killed a pair of  men-at-arms, but were ultimately slain. I wanted the kobolds to feel right for the Lost World jungle we were exploring, but still retain the "Dog-faced minions" feel. I described them as squat, emaciated humanoids. The Dog-faced element I described as "Imagine a human face stretched out to fit over a large, elongated dog skull". This is a visual I have used before and it never fails to make players squirm a little bit. 

    The party entered the chamber, seeing that it was an enormous grand hall (50 feet wide!) that turned twice and sloped downwards, sending it under the rest of this dungeon floor. A pair of elevated catwalks/balconies ran along either side, and the party slipped along these to then rain arrows down on the remaining kobolds, who were furiously trying to drive spikes into an enormous set of double-doors. They looted the poor wretches, finding some gems, and removed the spikes so the doors would open. The doors revealed a long descending stairwell of polished black marble, and after careful consideration, the party elected NOT to go to what was presumably the second level of the dungeon. 

    Returning to the main antechamber, and learning that the second door to the left led to the same massive grand hall, they moved to the doors on the right, leaving the door straight across from the entrance alone for now. The first right-hand door led to a long corridor with the floor covered in purple smoke. The players were not interested, they went to the second right-hand door, and followed a corridor to a room with two hobgoblins passed out drunk. The hobs were described as much taller, more muscular version of the dog-skull kobolds, though where the kobolds had something like a long hound skull, these creatures were like a human face draped over the skull of a pug or a bulldog. They tied the hobs up, thinking that bringing back live specimens to their wizard employer might lead to a bonus of some kind. 

    However, they also decided to interrogate them for intel about the dungeon. The first was uncooperative and screamed for help, but no help came. The party killed him to show the other one that they meant business. The survivor told them that treasure lay at the end of the purple-smoke hallway, but the players didn't believe him. The went for the final unchecked corridor, the door directly opposite the entrance in the antechamber. This led them to a room where some hobgoblins were training giant rats with a bite sleeve. The players did not have surprise, however, and the hobs were ready with several rats lunging and pulling on their leashes to be let loose against the party. The combat was short, and merciless. They killed the remaining rats in cages, and searched the room. Fun fact: a plurality of elves in the party means secret doors are almost always going to be found! 

    Three secret doors in this room (The ways of Appendix A can be treacherous), one leading to a store-room where the hobgoblins had their lair treasure, 2000 copper and 6000 silver), one leading to a winding rough-hewn tunnel, and one leading to an ominous narrow passage. Only 15 feet deep, a meagre 4 feet wide, the halls walls, ceiling and floor were blacker than black, the torchlight did not even reflect off the surfaces. At the end of the hall, mounted on the back wall, a huge, beautiful mirror with an ornate golden frame. Seamus approached, and found all the blemishes and scarring on his face completely absent. He looked better than he ever had! He tried to remove it from the wall, but it wouldn't budge. Making contact with it caused a saving throw, which he failed, and now he is DEFINITELY NOT CURSED and his impulsive desire to return to this mirror as often as possible and look at himself is COMPLETELY NORMAL. 

    Following the rough-hewn tunnel, they came across many branching paths, but in the end only followed one, through ANOTHER secret door into a room with a pair of shriekers, quickly dispatched. The Shriekers attracted a wandering encounter, a thin, extremely tall, gaunt pale man who slipped behind the party, being only seen by the rear guard, but not engaging. He smiled at them and vanished deeper into the tunnels. When interrogated about this, the captive hobgoblin spoke in abject terror about the "deathless man". The party decided it was time to go back to the ship and cash out this expedition.

    On the way home, which was much faster going with the current of the river, the party was attacked by a wereboar, who (based on his reaction rolls) simply wanted to scare them off, not massacre them. He killed a hireling archer, damaged one of the PCs, and ran off back into the woods. He seems territorial, I expect we will see him again in the future. 

    Returning home, the party got paid for their intel and made plans to go back at the soonest possible convenience. Seamus is fairly badly hurt, but the allure of that mirror has him considering going on the next expedition to the temple anyway, even if he isn't fully healed by that time. We shall see what goes down next time! There is a Battle Braunstein in the pipeline for (tentatively) May 11, more details to follow. It was Dobby the Elf's player's first time playing DnD of any edition ever this week, and he seemed to have a good time.