One Shots

This week I ran Operation FULMINATE from the Delta Green rulebook. I had a bit of difficulty with the timing of the adventure, because as written the player characters arrive at the mystery location in the morning but the meat of the scenario doesn’t begin until night.

The players knew something was up, so they were trying to investigate, but there wasn’t really much for them to do. So I just brought everything forward and had the action kick off back at the primary location when they were out investigating somewhere else: they heard an explosion, ran back, and got caught up in the action. But the first half of our session was a bit slow and in hindsight I should have handled it differently. We had fun, though.

One Shots

This week I ran Barrow of the Bone Blaggards from the OSE Adventure Anthology 2 in Whitehack. A fun time was had by all, though one player decided Whitehack wasn’t for them which means a bit of rethinking of the Hot Springs Island campaign. Maybe I’ll run it in Dolmenwood, just with custom classes.

One Shots

This week I ran the Call of Cthulhu scenario Dead Light, incorporating some of the suggestions from Seth Skorkowsky’s review like starting the evening before the scenario with the PCs making plans to attend a seance. The players caught on pretty quickly that the adventure was here on the road, and that the seance had just been a framing device, but I still think it was a good choice.

The scenario is pretty limited in scope, it’s kind of a “theme park” adventure where the GM just presents weird things to the players that they can’t really influence, but that’s ok for a one-shot (or as a brief interlude in a campaign). I prepared by coming up with a list of key scenes beforehand, and more or less just worked my way through the list over the course of the session. The players did end up trapping the Dead Light back in its box, they conducted the ritual to seal it away but used the doctor’s dead body rather than a living victim, I had the Light visibly unsure, looking between the corpse and the living characters, and the one leading the ritual had to make a hard POW roll (which they succeeded at) to convince it to go for the body. If they’d failed, the Light would have consumed them.

All in all, a fun sidetrack. Next week we’re going to do some Whitehack, to make sure everyone enjoys it since that’s what I’m planning to use for the next campaign. If someone does hate it, I guess it’s back to the drawing board!

The Halls of Arden Vul

We had our debrief session this week: three hours of answering questions, explaining lore, and pointing out the paths not taken. It still feels weird that it’s all over.

Next week: Call of Cthulhu for our first one-shot!

Hot Springs Island

I started preparation in earnest this week, converting a bunch of monsters, coming up with character backgrounds (species, vocation, and affiliation groups) and working out the necessary house rules (basically just the Dolmenwood rules for hexcrawling, camping, fishing, foraging, and hunting).

I’m putting together a couple of little booklets, which I’m doing with LaTeX and it’s a lot of fun to make something nice looking:

I’ve still got about two thirds of the monsters to convert, but I think I’ve got into the swing of things now so I intend to finish those next week. I still need to figure out some setting details (like how much it costs to get to the island and how frequent ships are, which will affect how long the players need to camp out) but it’s all coming together.

The Halls of Arden Vul

It is done!

We wrapped up a few remaining player goals (including slaying a dragon) and then went through every character and the players gave a short epilogue of what they’re up to in the coming months and years. Some faded into obscurity, preferring the quiet life; others became great leaders and respected heroes. I concluded with one final epilogue regarding the heqeti:

Deep beneath the earth, several miles from the great Ziggurat of Kauket, the fleeing heqeti pilgrims arrive at the closest of their underdark habitations, a major temple-city with a population of thousands, which lies on the shores of the vast underground ocean: the Silent Sea. Other travellers carry the news to Lissak-Tol, the city of the Kaliyani, and to the hidden Duregar enclaves, so secret that none but the Duregar themselves know their names. The news of this third loss of the Ziggurat, and of the much-loved and well-respected Great Tongue Reepsiq rocks heqeti society. Some whisper that Kauket has turned his back on his Ziggurat, as punishment for the heqeti’s failures; but this is never said in the hearing of the priests. The Tongues, Great and Lesser, each a powerful Cleric who presides over a temple-city or a shrine, exchange correspondence, consult the omens, and gather in small groups, to debate what must be done. But for a time, a few generations at least, Evil is driven from the Halls of Arden Vul.

Next week is the debrief session, and then on to a couple of months of oneshots while I prepare the next campaign: Hot Springs Island!

The Halls of Arden Vul

Well, they did it.

Last session the PCs got down to the base of the chasm with their army, the varumani, and 8 Sun-Scarred knights. They sent the knights & army south-east, the varumani into the marsh, and themselves headed north-east and took out the guards at the heqeti breeding ponds. We weren’t using mass combat rules, so I essentially hand-waved the majority of the fight and decided that everyone the PCs brought with them were tying up most of the heqeti and the real battle would be over once the ziggurat itself was conquered.

The players emerged onto a summoning platform and saw a scene of chaos and nightmare: varumani fighting maybe 60 heqeti, 3 12ft tall demons, and 2 huge corpse-white worms. Before them was a heqeti casting some sort of spell. Atop the ziggurat were two heqeti spellcasters with maybe a dozen guards, one bowed with age who at a gesture of his wrinkled hand reduced several varumani to ash.

The heqeti on the summoning platform summoned a third great white worm, so the players had to fight their way through that and two spellcasters to engage the ziggurat. Good use of a couple of silence spells shut down the spellcasters on the ziggurat, and the party’s heavy hitter got teleported to the top of the ziggurat. A wall of fire was used to shut down the stairs so that reinforcements couldn’t get up. But those giant demons are no joke! The players eventually triumphed but it was two and a half hours of pretty dynamic combat: splitting their forces, moving between vantage points, focussing on different enemies, it didn’t get stale at all. We spent the final 30 minutes just wandering around the area to see what heqeti life was like.

We’re doing one final session next week to wrap up some loose ends—one player wants to fight the dragon on the surface, another wants to attempt the Tower of Pol—and then that’ll be it!

The next campaign?

This week I read Ultraviolet Grasslands, which was the other strong contender for the next campaign. In fact I was wondering if I could combine it with Hot Springs Island (the grasslands connects to a port city that has ships which go to the archipelago), but they’re just too tonally different. I’d have to make UVG significantly less weird, in which case there’s not much point using it.

I am toying with the idea of connecting them temporally though. I could have something distinctive and memorable in my Hot Springs Island setting, that reappears later on when I run a UVG campaign but it’s from way in the past, but that’s more of an easter egg.

So I’m going to go for Hot Springs Island next.

The question then becomes: which system do I use? It’s a system neutral book so basically anything D&D-ish would work, but it does seem to be written assuming fairly competent PCs: they’ll be dealing with elementals and extraplanar shenanigans. Initially I was thinking Worlds Without Number which is an OSR system that has somewhat more high-powered characters, but Whitehack also came to mind. Whitehack is interesting as it has a very flexible magic system, whereas Worlds Without Number has a fairly standard spell list. They’d both work, but I am leaning towards Whitehack at the moment. I’ll be running one-shots of both before deciding though.

The Halls of Arden Vul

It’s finally happening! The assault on the Ziggurat of Kauket! Today about half an hour into the session the players jumpscared me with “we think we’re ready”—for some reason I thought they’d end a session with that and I’d have a week to mentally prepare myself.

They came up with a reasonable plan: they’d send three characters, made magically invisible, down the underground river (like when they scouted the ziggurat out) to loop around and open the portcullis from the inside, with that happening at the same time the army arrives. This part went fairly well, though they did alert the heqeti when they burst through a door without listening to see if anyone was on the other side first. But they completely lost the momentum they had after taking the portcullis by pausing for 40 minutes to set up a robot turret: useful to have if the enemy comes to you, but the heqeti fall back to defensive positions at the ziggurat itself (I’m not just screwing over my players, it’s what the book says!) to prepare ambushes and summon demonic allies. So the enemy had plenty of time to get all their lengthy demon-summoning rituals done, which they otherwise might not have.

The players then split their force into three, sending their allies towards the ziggurat itself while they went off down a side corridor (kind of a dick move if you ask me). They fought and overcame some enemies, and I think the players are finally getting a feel for why the heqeti are a dangerous faction: not so tough, at their level, if they get the drop on a scouting party; but if the heqeti have time to take up tactical positions their spellcasters are tough.

When they finally make it out to the ziggurat next session they’ll see a scene of pure chaos. Pitched battle between their forces and the heqeti in the marsh, a trio of 12ft tall demons stalking through the melee and melting people, giant corpse-white worms eating people, and heqeti spellcasters on the ziggurat throwing down fireballs from above. But I’m pretty confident the players will manage it.

The Halls of Arden Vul

Not much in terms of action this week, but pretty big in terms of consequences. The players scouted out much of the cavern of the Ziggurat of Kauket, including the route back to the chasm floor, without being discovered. They now have a map of the area and know where to march their army. Simultaneously, they had their army moving massive amounts of treasure (via the pair of linked teleporters they set up) between the Tomb of Isadora and their secure vault. This culminated in over 3 million XP, which levelled up all the PCs and brought their entire army (over 200 guys) up from 1st to 3rd level.

Discussion between the players after the session basically came down to “we’ve got two things left: destroy the ziggurat, then take down the dragon”.

So the end is nigh.

We’ve decided not to use mass combat rules when they go for the ziggurat. We did for the war on the Cult of Set but it was slow and also felt a bit anticlimactic, as the only Setite leader we fought in a personal-scale combat was Stephania. So for the ziggurat, we’re going to abstract the larger battle into the background (I’ll have a look at the relative strength of the heqeti and the players’ troops and make something up), and the players will instead switch between controlling their characters, a group of 8 Sun-Scarred Knights who will be accompanying them, and 4 Varumani Hunters. These three groups will be going after the heqeti leaders and securing strategic locations, but also the Sun-Scarred Knights and the Varumani have their own objectives which I’ve included to foster some interesting roleplaying.

Still working them out, but broadly what I have for the Knights is:

1. Survive, as the loss of even a single knight is a diffficult cost to bear
2. Weaken the varumani if we can do so without being caught, they’re getting too powerful
3. Avoid using our most powerful weapons as recharging them is difficult

And for the Varumani:

1. Win glory, go out with a bang if death is inevitable
2. Find our comrade Bedara, or her remains
3. Survive

Very different priorities on survival! Possible secret betrayal from the Knights! Fun times and excitement ahead.

The next campaign?

I was going to run Ars Magica. It’s a game I’ve wanted to play for a long time, and the new Definitive Edition got me very excited for it. But… that was a while ago, Arden Vul has gone on for so much longer that the excitement has cooled. And so I’ve been looking at OSR things again.

Hot Springs Island is a strong contender for the next game. It’s a very dense island hexcrawl with a lot of faction play and weirdness. It’s much more “5e” than “OSR” in tone I think, but still doable (you’d just need to use a system with slightly more powerful characters than, say, OSE). The lore is cool. It comes with a player-facing book, presented as an in-world document from the local Adventurers’ Guild. I think it could be a lot of fun.

But there’s some not so great aspects too.

Firstly, it’s system neutral, and not in the hepful way that a lot of OSR products are (providing minimal stats), it provides no stats and just describes everything through prose. What’s the relative power level of any two creatures in the bestiary? No way of telling. I’d need to stat out all the creatures, magic items, and anything else that interacts with game mechanics myself.

Secondly, the dungeons kind of suck, they’re somewhat linear as each one basically exists to tell a story, and they’re not really keyed, you’re supposed to roll to determine what’s going on in each room every time the players visit. Also they have maps but no scales, so it’s hard to tell how big anything is. So I would probably want to substantially change the dungeons, maybe even replace some of them entirely.

Thirdly, the author clearly has some sort of sex-thing going on, as the ancient elves are obsessed with pregnancy and have orgy contests where teams would compete to have the most orgasms in a certain time, the efreet faction has sex slaves, and the ogre faction (who are former slaves (workers, not sex) who rebelled and broke away from the efreet faction) kidnap strong female adventurers and transform them into ogres to produce lots of ogre babies. The only faction which doesn’t have a sex-thing going on is the nereids, who are all… beautiful women… oh dear.

Overall I’d say the major weakness of Hot Springs Island is that the book is very high-concept, but for actual at-the-table use you need detail, which it doesn’t give you much of. It’s usable, but will take work. It reminds me of Veins of the Earth in that way, which I complained about a couple of weeks ago.

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The Halls of Arden Vul

This week we picked up at the beginning of combat in the Tomb of Isadora. The players defeated the animated statues and iron golem (not really a surprise any more) and proceeded to explore the place fully. They solved a puzzle that led to the secret tomb of Priscus Pulcher himself, and fought four invisible stalkers for the loot. Since they’ve explored the whole place and only found one body they’re now 80% sure that the “statue” of a gold dragon is actually Isadora the gold dragon just in some sort of death-like hibernation, but they don’t want to put that theory to the test for some reason…

After that, they received intel from the Sun-Scarred Knights that there may be a way down to the heqeti Ziggurat of Kauket via an underground river. Off they went, and we ended the session with them emerging from the river to stand atop a giant dam, overlooking a stinking bioluminescent marsh in a vast cavern, with a huge stepped structure rising from the centre. We’re finally here!