OD&D Session 008: Reform Looms

     This week is special, because three big things are happening:

    1. The first "Rules Patch" is being implemented, content from Supplement I: Greyhawk is being added to the game, beginning the process of "Graduating" to playing the fullness of AD&D. This "Boil the Frog Slowly" approach has had a lot of upsides, it gets the game going and gets the players invested, and when they are invested they care more about the rules. New rules are opportunities to improve one's position in the Gameworld, new means of solving problems, new types of characters to play. I know at least one player is quite excited for the arrival of the Thief.

    2. This is the first session wherein the persistent faction/patron dimension of play is being implemented. We have 6 factions being actively controlled by players who submitted orders last night, and they have SCHEMES upon SCHEMES that I cannot divulge here for threat of breaking the Fog of War. Suffice to say, the Gameworld has started to shift, and the balance of peace may well collapse in the coming weeks. But on the other hand, it may not. Maybe instead we'll get a gradual slide into a fractured, corrupt setting where powerful forces scheme and plot against each other in the shadows, nobody is really in charge, and the enforcement of law and stability is unlikely. This would be just as great as all-out war, in many ways that sort of environment is tailor-made for an Appendix N game.

    3. WE ARE THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET! The players have been confronted by BDubs, he has issued the next phase of the operation. They must, while in a regular session at the scale of the individual adventurer, initiate, cause, instigate or otherwise contribute to the emergence of a new Braunstein, and they need to make it happen in the next month. If they succeed: +15% Xp to their character for the subsequent 4 sessions. If they fail: -25% Xp to their character for the same duration. A hefty consequence! Enough to motivate behaviour, while not punitive enough to simply trash the experience for someone. 

   First thing's first: the players arrived and I helped make sure all their characters were up to date with the new rules patch. One player said "I finally feel like I'm really playing D&D now that I've been nerfed". Good stuff. Second I gave them a quick overview of the state of affairs in Dschungelberg (Pronounced "Jungle-Berg"). The HMS Greyhawk arrived today with peasant families looking to start a fresh life in the new world, reinforcements for a mercenary company drained by Orcish guerilla tactics, a very angry group of paladins and inquisitors, and worst of all: criminals trapped in penal servitude and clans of H*lflings. There goes the neighbourhood. 

    It was at this point that I explained the Bdubs challenge. There was one player running late due to some bad traffic, so I took the time to really articulate the fine details of the challenge. Almost immediately a plan started getting hatched. The players have established a sort of core "A-Team" of reliable characters that adventure together consistently, and so they started scheming. They set the scene: Its late night at a pub in town, they've all had some ale, and they start spitballing ideas. How can they get some real power? They've had a number of successful expeditions and are starting to level up, starting to really roll in cash. At this point we should establish which character's are being played:

1. Seamus the Fighter, who has been reliably played by my brother, who controls the Church Faction, along with his men-at-arms

2. Yon the Elf, also reliably present, whose player is in control of Siegfried the Evil Wizard, along with his men-at-arms

3. Sir Gerric the Elf, whose player controls Big Chief Gorkamoley. along with his men-at-arms

4. Akaviri the Elf, whose player controls the Mountain Gnomes, along with his men-at-arms

5. Figel Narage the Cleric, whose player controls The Swamp People. Figel had some Men-at-Arms, but he specified that they had been travelling together for a while. They were a party at one point, then broke up, but then they got back together, you see? They were a "Re-Formed Party". This becomes important later so it should be specified that one of these men-at-arms was an archer who rolled exactly 1 hitpoint. We ruled this as a character who, despite his frail and sickly body, was seeking glory and potentially a death for some greater cause. Little did we know when this was declared that he would get his wish.

6. James the Fighter, whose player controls the Mercenary Company of Osman Rausch, along with his men-at-arms.

 

   With most of my patron players present, I was very pleased to see them engage in good faith. The late player arrived and I pulled him outside to bring him up to speed on everything he missed. When we re-entered the garage what I saw amazed me. Seamus, who in previous sessions was already talking about setting up a castle and building an army (I had sent him this excellent video from Jon Mollison a year or so ago) was in full conspiracy mode. Him and Yon the elf were hotly engaged in an idea of how to drive a rift between the mercenaries and the church, to start a war of some kind. Assassination came up as a possibility. James' player asked me if the mercenaries were responsible for law and order or if that was handled by the church. I explained that the mercenaries were less like cops and more like a PMC, they might retrieve criminals on behalf of the state, but they don't wield any judicial authority except on contract. That the loyalty of the local military is strictly financial is certainly useful data.

    Figel Narage chimed in. His player is deeply concerned with agency and with immersion. While some of the schemes being hatched might produce a Braunstein, per the challenge, this was not sufficient. He needed the plan to make sense and be in-line with character motivations. That means no arbitrary goofy schemes the trick factions into fighting for no reason. The characters need to have a reason for upsetting the gameworld. He proposed independence: the welfare of the city of Dschungelberg should not be in the hands of some cabal of aristocrats on the other side of the ocean! Self-determination was the name of the game! What Dschungelberg needs, he says, is a way to make the city independent from the empire, out from under the yoke of those blasted elves with their short memories and long hair! Sir Gerric catches on, if the empire is allowed to rule this city it will be drained of its resources, all the riches of this land funneled away from the people who live here! Seamus was on board with this, a power vacuum is a time of great opportunity for ambitious men. 

Suffice to say, a very productive night at the pub

    It was at this point that after 20 minutes of sustained in-character dialogue and discussion things started to derail into Brexit memes and assertions that Dschungelberg must not abide taxation without representation. But they had the beginnings of a plan, to assassinate Lord Barotha Carvalloman and take advantage of the power vacuum. The utter cheek of it! The audacity! They'll flesh out details in downtime, but they know the general idea of what they want to achieve. At this point they decided that for tonight they would go back to the Library of Shuga-Koth and see about finding the stairs down to the third dungeon level. 

    As they were hiring men-at-arms and getting ready to go, the town was abuzz with excitement. That morning, a delegation of visitors from the Swamp People arrived. They wore pelts and furs, curiously tailored in a fashion reminiscent of the clothes that would have been worn by the original colonists 130 years ago. They came to parley with the colonial leaders, which was no small thing, this is the first contact anyone has made with a human faction in this strange new world. Having witnessed the arrival of the diplomats, the party set off up the river to the dungeon. No random encounters, they arrived to the dungeon without issue. 

    First thing they encountered as they entered was a group of hobgoblin refugees, fleeing the exterminating efforts of the Mountain Gnomes and looking for a place to establish themselves. The party, with men-at-arms accounted for, outnumbered the armed hobgoblins 2:1, but the presence of women and children made many in the party squeamish about extermination. They made an arrangement with the hobgoblins that, if they left immediately and never returned, the adventurers would spare the lives of this clan on the run. Seamus was disappointed in a lost chance to up his K:D ratio, but the hobs decided to live to fight another day and took their families back out into the jungle. 

    Returning after nearly a month to the second level of the dungeon, where the titular Library resides, the party encountered a group of 3 snake-headed Magicians. I did a double-take when I saw that what this meant was a group of 6th level magic-users, potentially a total deathtrap for the players. Intiative was won by the players and they scrambled to kill them off before they had a chance to Fireball the party to death. However, when I rolled to see what spells they had, I was shocked to see not a single damage-dealing spell. So, on their turn, the two surviving Magicians caste Haste on themselves and bravely ran away to alert the lord of the dungeon.

    The party continued looting and exploring, but eventually the magicians returned with their master in tow, a Vampire named Ramsugra that I had generated months ago when I first made this dungeon for a different game. Despite the hostile circumstances, I checked his reaction. Double sixes, though modified down from purely friendly on account of the way these adventurers have been running roughshod all through his subterranean home. Open to discussion, he asked them why they had come to this place, what is it they were seeking, and in the initial negotiations Seamus mentioned the name of Siegfried as their on-again-off-again employer. This caught the attention of the Vampire. 

    Last Saturday, when I sent out the initial faction dossiers indicating resources and intel that each patron had access to, I told Siegfried that the "self-described owner" of the Library wished to meet with him. As of today, the wizard has not met with this vampire, so when these adventurers came around claiming to be employees of his, the vampire simply could not resist further parley. This sort of thing is the kind of organic serendipitous event that makes running 1:1 Fog of War so satisfying. Threads just naturally overlap in dramatic and exciting ways that I do not need to plan ahead for or try and railroad the characters into. This whole sequence produced some very good immersive role-play from the party as they bandied about with this deathless dungeon duke. Eventually he made them an offer. If Siegfried had stopped paying the players to gather intel on the library, Ramsugra would treat turnabout as fair play. While, he explained, he was lacking in coinage to pay them, he would reward magic items to them if they provided him with the location of Siegfried. 

    They mulled it over and worked out some terms and stipulations, but they eventually agreed. Ramsugra had one more condition. He was happy to work with them, but only if they paid him tribute. There were 30 of them all together, and he wanted one of them to stay behind as food for his vampiric hunger. Figel Narage's sickly man-at-arms managed to pass an extremely unlikely loyalty check and gave himself up for the cause. He was promised good food and lodging, and an absence of pain, and that his sacrifice would cement the relationship between this group of adventurers and the vampire lord. Yet another convergence of previously established facts and emergent random events. I love this game so much. This whole sequence was deeply unsettling, the casual banter between the neutral-at-best-chaotic-at-worst adventurers and the charming but predatory vampire was funny but bleak, and brought out some top-notch in-character play from several of the players. 

    Figel asked the vampire if he would like to become a party member and receive a blue ribbon in exchange for 5 gold pieces. The vampire smiled and instead offered an advance payment on the whereabouts of Siegfried, a small gold ring that increases the wearer's charisma by 2. With this first magic item reward revealed, the party eagerly began thinking about how they were going to deliver on their agreement with Ramsugra. They set off for home, but they weren't out of the woods yet.

    As they made camp the night before they would get back to town, they were once again attacked by the wereboar that lives along the river. They were, however, not unprepared. After the last attack, several players had prioritized the purchasing of silver daggers and arrows for just this sort of situation, and fought it off. The beast, heavily wounded and shocked at prey that was able to harm him, fled back into the woods. The players, having not really gotten any loot from this session, decided to pursue him in hopes that he might lead them to his lair. While they did manage to find him in his lair, and kill him, the dice were against them as we rolled for treasure and they walked away with a meagre 10,000 copper pieces. Nonetheless, they were pleased to have taken down a dangerous 9HD monster and made the river safer to travel along. 

    When they got back to town Figel's player let them all know that, as it was now June 12 in-game, his faction (The Swamp People) had put up a 1000 gold reward to anyone who could Remove Curse on their kinsman who was living in exile as a lycanthrope along the river. The 200gp value of his lair treasure didn't feel quite as good, but the missed opportunity was not enough to make them regret doing something as cool as killing a wereboar. 

    From Figel witholding this info while the party hunted the lycanthrope, to Yon eagerly entering into a contract with a potential threat to Siegfried, I was very impressed with the many ways I watched my players keep their factions and their adventurers separate. At no point did I see them let the motivations of their faction bleed over to selfishly impact the activity of the characters. Total good-faith separation of the two levels of play, this sort of high-trust behaviour can't be bought, you can really only get it by having good friends that you can rely upon. Running the game for these guys is such a privilege, and I can't wait to see the new ways they are going to completely wreck my campaign world.