#391

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.