#369

The Halls of Arden Vul

Pretty eventul session this week.

Firstly, as this is the last session before Halloween (we play on Sundays) I called this the “Halloween Special” and said all the goblins were wearing carved pumpkins over their heads.

But, putting that aside, the players completed the 8th trial of Arden, and also saved the legendary Forge of Zhorak from doppelgangers, just in the nick of time. As written, doppelgangers are there and planning to destroy it, but I decided to give the players a chance to beat them to it.

I had the Survivors of the Stone (an NPC dwarven adventuring group) looking for the Forge. They had a map to it via teleporter but didn’t know how to get back, so they were wary of just going (but would do so as a last resort). I had determined in advance when doppelgangers would ambush them, steal the map, and destroy the Forge. Four days before the attack, the players decided to go talk to those dwarven adventurers they’d heard were looking for the Forge. There’s a PC dwarf so they shared intel. On the day of the attack, the human member of the Survivors of the Stone escaped (she fell down a 50ft gap and the doppelgangers left her for dead), and came to the PCs for help.

The players had a rough plan to make teleporters between the Forge of Zhorak and the Arden Cult level by (1) sending a spellcaster to Zhorak, (2) getting back with a Bead of Escape, and (3) using the rudishva Fire Pits of Creation to make a pair of linked teleporters. So they quickly enacted that by sending an invisible spellcaster to Zhorak to scout it out and learn the area well enough to make the teleporter, then all rushed through and took out the doppelgangers before they could destroy the Forge.

Next week we’ll see if the players inadvertently release the fire elemental, or trigger the iron golem defense mechanism, or get killed by the spectre of Zhorak.

As this was the last session of November, allow me to recant my suggestion that the players would complete the Trials of Arden this month. They changed focus and are well behind where I expected them to be—players, how can you predict them?

Ars Magica

The Dolmenwood books are great, but what I really want to run next is Ars Magica.

I’ve put together most of a pitch for the next campaign, after we finish Arden Vul. Here’s the intro:

In Ars Magica you play a magum (male “magus”, female “maga”, plural “magi”) who lives in a covenant, that is to say a castle (or whatnot) with a group of other magi (your fellow player characters), getting up to whatever they want really, while also being part of a Europe-spanning wizard community called the Order of Hermes.

The ability to work magic is called the Gift, and while it conveys magical power, it is off-putting to people and animals. To get around this, each magum has a companion, played by a different player, who is a non-Gifted but plot-significant character. Finally, there are the everyday servants, farmers, labourers, and so on who make the covenant function: these are called grogs and should be treated as expendable redshirts.

A campaign of Ars Magica, called a saga, often lasts decades of game time, with a single session covering anywhere from a few days (if in the middle of an adventure) to multiple years (if the magi are just working in their labs). A typical adventure will feature at most one magum, possibly one or two companions, and a gaggle of grogs.

The year is AD 1220: Henry III is King of England, Frederick II is Holy Roman Emperor, Honorius III is Pope, the Fifth Crusade is in full force, and Gothic architecture is in style at the time.

One of the players is visiting me in a couple of weeks, and I’m going to pitch it to them then.