#307

The Halls of Arden Vul

This week was one of the least action-packed sessions in the whole campaign, I think. One player was off, and the other spent most of the time talking to a troll historian. They learned some new things, confirmed some things they already knew, and so are armed with knowledge for delving deeper into the dungeon! And they will need to delve deeper, as the old secrets have been lost to time, and the only way to figure them out is to find the few remaining artefacts.

They also learned that the trolls love cakes of protein paste.

One of the big secrets, that the players don’t even have the least suspicion of yet, is that the trolls are bio-engineered creatures, created by the ancient aliens to be good workers. I’m hoping that when they do discover that, they’ll say “oh yeah, now it makes sense why …” about some of the stranger traits of the trolls, for example that they have remarkably little initiative and are very easily influenced by surviving ancient aliens. I’ve been seeding these odd behaviours where I can, but without explicitly pointing out that they’re strange, hoping to build up to a fun reveal.

The One Ring

The style of this game is basically the opposite of Arden Vul. Middle Earth is a story-like world, where good triumphs over evil so long as it tries hard enough and doesn’t lose hope. On that note, this week the company avenged their fallen comrade by slaying the great orc, Oswaldsbane!

The beast itself went down more easily than they expected, as it was still wounded from their last encounter. The blow dealt by a dying man leading to the eventual defeat of his killer is a great story-like moment; I could have said that the orc was fully healed now after a few weeks, but that wouldn’t have been as narratively satisfying.

I’m not giving the players plot armour (well, more plot armour than the system has built into it) of course, but I am definitely mindful of how to make a session feel like something that could plausibly appear, in some more polished form, in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.

In the orc’s lair the players discovered an odd symbol, and consulted a crotchety old loremaster in Bree who was able to identify it as the symbol of an old fortress from back in the good old days. Then they decided to go off to Rivendell, which was near the fort, to stop over and hopefully get some aid before scouting the place out.

I made the loremaster way more of a dick than he really needed to be, which led to the players deciding to have nothing more to do with him so far as they can help it, which will be an interesting challenge as I’d intended to use him to point them to a future phase of this first “campaign arc”.

Oh well, a problem for the future.