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!
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