#310

The Halls of Arden Vul

A great session this week. The players got into some good old fashioned exploration and combat, and then stumbled upon something really cool: two living dolls, created by someone they only called “Father”, but who seemed to be the reclusive and strange wizard Kerbog Khan.

The dolls had fled “Father” because he saw them as just tools, “like the others”—by which they meant the Khan’s other, more primitive, automata. One of the dolls had, unfortunately, been smashed by a large cave lizard and the other didn’t want to leave its side. So the players picked them up and took them away from the Khan, to the safety of the nearby town. There they discovered that the smashed doll had an actual brain inside its wooden skull, hooked up to magical circuitry, and far beyond anything the players or the Arcane Practitioner’s Club in town could understand or repair.

In fact, the Arcane Practitioner’s Club were astounded by this. Nobody makes automata that have independent minds or can cast spells, so they’d just dismissed a lot of the rumours coming out of Arden Vul about Kerbog Khan as exaggerations. Certainly anybody who could do this must be an archmage of the highest order, someone who would normally be famous across the empire…

The Club concluded that “Kerbog Khan” must be an alias of Cerbactos Kalthetos. Famed across the empire for his knowledge and power, his advice was sought even by the Imperial Court. But he disappeared around 60 years ago with several incredibly valuable books, and all spies and assassins sent to recover them have been unsuccessful. The NPCs warned the players to be careful: if Kerbog Khan is the renegade archmage, he was a vastly powerful magic-user some 50 years ago, and he’s evidently only got better as now he is performing unprecedented feats of magical engineering.

Not someone you want to get on the wrong side of at all.

The One Ring

This week we had the first of what is shaping up to be a two, maybe three, part diversion into the local politics of Bree, with the players trying to convince a majority of the town council to vote out the Reeve, who is in a kind of Theoden / Wormtongue situation with his southern advisor.

This was the first time we brought out the “council” rules, which is the third major subsystem in The One Ring (the other two being “combat” and “journeys”), and which is a kind of “social challenge on a time limit” mechanic. The way it works is the GM decides whether the player’s request is “reasonable”, “bold”, or “outrageous”, which corresponds to a number of successes the players have to reach across a combination of rolls; and then one of the players makes a single skill check to open negotiations, which determines how many attempts the players have to reach the required number of successes.

A single check can give multiple successes (meeting the target number is a success, and each d6 that came up “6” is another success), so there’s a bit of strategy with which skills the players will want to bring to bear. The rules also say the GM should reward bonus or penalty dice depending on how amenable the target is to the approach the players are taking.

This time the players approached three councillors:

• Oswald Breeker, a grumpy old loremaster who they have had some dealings with before. The players smashed it, they got a great success on an insight roll to determine what he really cared about, and then made full use of that to bring him to their side. My fallback was that he has a theory he wants investigating, and doing that would also win him over. But they got the success without needing that, and they still have an interesting theory to follow up on later.

• Fitch Talltree, the leader of one of the outlying villages. No council here, as there’s only one thing that would win Fitch over to the cause of some outsiders: proving their worth, through the hunt! He conscripted them to join him in a quest to slay the troll which killed his father 10 years previously. The players sure weren’t expecting to fight a troll this week!

• Rollo Lightfoot, a hobbit who the players did not manage to win over. They picked up that he was very stressed out over organising the upcoming smoke-ring competition, but rather than make use of that they just trotted out the same old spiel about keeping the road safe. It didn’t work well, and he ended up asking them to stop worrying him and to leave his house.

The players need two more votes, and have two more councillors to approach. They could possibly win over Rollo Lightfoot, but it would be even harder this time.