Game Reports - ACKS and LOTFP

York 1630 - F*ck Around and Find Out

I'm a few weeks behind on game reports for this one.  Our players, the magic user Allister, cleric Blackburn, Yuri the Elf, and Remy Knotwise the Halfing, have been exploring a puzzle dungeon called The Grinding Gear, a dungeon beneath an abandoned inn within the woods west of Aldfield.  Allister has two henchmen as well, a fighter named Wood and a specialist named Toby.  Rather than post a dull play by play, I'll just focus on some highlights.

At one point they encountered a set of stairs that led up to a landing, the passage turned right, and the stairs continued up.  The landing was one large pressure plate trap, and anyone that triggered the trap got launched in the air by a spring-loaded wall that threw them off the top of the stairs, like a giant pinball bumper.  The players avoided the trap and straddled the corner to avoid the pressure plate - that's not the interesting point.  Later in the dungeon when they ran into some "fast zombies" (ie, ghouls) the cleric used a scroll of turn undead to drive them down the same hallway - he quickly reasoned he could make them flee down the stairs and let the pinball bumper take care of them.  There was a moment, much later in the game, when they went by that way again and found the broken bodies of the zombies at the base of the steps, horribly mangled after being launched into the air.  I think one of them was still snapping it's jaws futilely at anything that came near, unable to even crawl with it's broken body.

They were running low on water and needed to leave the dungeon and return to the surface (they hadn't yet found the water source in the dungeon).  So they returned to the surface and carefully retrieved water from the well, cautious that there were still mosquito bats in the vicinity living in the attic of the inn.  It had been several days since the players first smoked them out.

A random encounter while the players were staying top-side brought some inquisitive bandits into the area of the inn, and they caught sight of some of the players fleeing into the inn and barring the door.  The bandits gave up investigating the statue and bodies in the clearing to mess with the players in the inn.  "You better leave us alone - don't f*ck around and find out", yelled one of the players through the door.  (We're from Philly where Gritty - the Flyers mascot - is basically the mayor of f*ck around and find out).  One of the quick thinking players ran up stairs with a pot and pan and started waking up all the mosquito bats in the attic with a huge racket, while the players continued to goad the bandits into yelling back at them through the front door.  This picture perfectly captures the moment the bandits got swarmed by angry mosquito bats while the halfling and elf laughed at their misery from the safety of the inn.  I love how this group repeatedly figures out how to use the environment as a weapon.

Here's a pic from a previous session when they were exploring an area with pits, and the halfling went down to explore after they killed a ghoul safely from outside the pit.  The halfling player was over the moon with the way his character has been depicted in these game vignettes.  He's even got a tiny pin with The Pillories logo on his hat.

ACKS Greyhawk - Let's Look Fabulous

In Greyhawk news, they did it.  The players finally had enough of Temple of Elemental Evil level one and started exploring the second level.  They seem to be figuring this D&D thing out.  They murdered a minotaur, and cut through a lair area with room after room of bandits wiping them out with a barrage of sleep spells and scooping up the spoils.  As an impartial observer, I believe they'll start getting more experience and leveling up... their insistence on grinding out all of level 1 was getting a little tedious.  Note - there is a horrifying room in the top center of level 1 with like four Earth Elementals patrolling it... the players learned about this place by interrogating some bad guys, and astutely decided to leave if for now.  They found a scroll of protection vs elementals on level 2, so now the wheels are turning.

Their fabulous moment came when exploring a junk-filled room with chests and wardrobes... full of many garments, clothes, dresses, and other sartorial accoutrements.  Old Gary (or perhaps Frank) was being generous when he wrote, "If care is taken in sorting, adventurers can fill three large sacks with good garments, worth 500gp per sack".  This was the last thing the players did on their way out of the dungeon for the night, and many jokes were made... "gee, we barely get any experience for fighting in deadly combat, but bargain hunting for clothes in the bandit's thrift store and suddenly my mojo is pointing up".  Like my son the football player always says about his "drip", look-good, play-good.  That's 1500xp of looking good for you, fellas.

In other ACKS news, I just learned that ACKS 2.0 (second edition) will be hitting the kickstarter later this month.  Oof - I love the compactness of the original book, it's an all-in-one, but ACKS 2.0 will have a player's books, judge's book, and monster book.  It's a great rules set for combat heavy, oldish school heroic fantasy, but a three book set is not an auto-buy for me - I have questions.  We may stick with first edition, we'll see.  Anyone else in the same boat or you diving in?

ACKS Game Report: The Beatings Shall Continue Until Play Improves

Fantasy life has been rough for the Temple of Elemental Evil crew.  They lost several henchmen in these sessions.  The beatings shall continue until play improves!

Their first loss was difficult to avoid.  They've been camped near the river in the Gnarley Forest, emerging from the woods to explore the Temple of Elemental Evil.  They use canoes to cross a small river on their way to the Temple.  River encounters are always in play.  This particular river encounter involved a Naiad, surfacing in the early morning when Cormac and Dunne went down to the river to fetch water for the camp.

A beautiful half-garbed waif broke the surface of the river, water dripping from her silky tresses.  Cormac's jaw dropped open in amazement as he fell victim to her charms.  Dunne was further back, and rushed to the bank to help, but he succumbed to her whammy as well.  Cormac was bestowed water breathing as the Naiad lured him away into the watery depths (to serve her for a year).  The players pointed out there are worse ways to lose a henchman.  Not equipped or interested in pursuing a rescue, Dunne wrote a message for Cormac, sealed it in an empty bottle, and left it  stuck in some tree roots nearby, against the day Cormac returned from his year of "service" - whatever Naiads do with their handsome servants - washing the dishes and folding the towels and similar house chores, I'm sure.

Once the matter with Cormac's abduction was settled, the group decided they wanted to go back to town.  They had learned in a previous adventure someone named "Gremag" had hired brigands to seek out their camp, and the only Gremag they knew was an employee or partner at the trading post in Hommlet.  Time to go back to town and ask some questions.

By this time, they have accumulated plenty of horses and a few wagons in the camp, so they left with a wagon, draft horses, and a bunch of riding horses, making it to Hommlet later in the same day.  The players took care of  "town stuff" and also checked in with the lord of Hommlet, the magic user Burne.  (Lord Burne has granted them permission to rebuild the moathouse as a future base).  Burne reminded them Hommlet was a village of laws, and there would be no vigilante action - they could bring Gremag into custody and have him imprisoned, but they need to confirm they have the right man first.  Luckily, they had spared "Captain Stephen" the leader of the brigands, and he was working with the players - he could identify Gremag.  The players hatched a plot!

Dunne, who lives in Hommlet as a distiller of spirits, sold whiskey to the traders, was a known business contact of them, and was not known to be an associate of the adventurers.  They decided Dunne would be the one to pay a normal visit to the trading post, while an "invisible" Captain Stephen (under an invisibility spell) would identify Gremag from outside the window.  The other players, mounted, would be in the vicinity of the trading post as required.  Afterwards, everyone would regroup at Dunne's house.

The exchange between Dunne and the two traders, Rannos Davl and Gremag, eventually grew strained.  Dunne kept trying to pump them for information, and they were suspicious about why he's been out of the village so long.  He did learn there was a peddler in town (Bob the Peddler) and they were irritated because Bob was undercutting them - Bob was staying at the inn.  Eventually Dunne left and confirmed with Captain Stephen that Gremag the Trader is the same man who hired Stephen and the brigands in Nulb, and off they went to Dunne's house to rendezvous.  The other players quickly rode to Dunne's house behind him, and everyone dismounted and went inside.  There was no subtlety.

There was an awkward moment when the players realized Dunne's house was just down the street from the trader's.  The groomsman and guard in the yard had a clear line of  sight the whole time, as a large gang of heavily armored dudes descended on Dunne's place (undermining some elements of the story Dunne just told the traders).  Oops.

The players decided they needed to go the traders as soon as they had a credible attack plan and arrest Gremag - so they started scheming.  Spugnoir would throw a Sleep spell in through an open window and the players would go with the frontal assault.  When the players actually busted their way in, the minions were asleep (the groom and mercenary) but Rannos was behind the counter, looking irritated.  No sign of Gremag.  (I'm not even sure the players made the connection that Rannos wasn't asleep because he was too  high level…)

"Gremag left in a hurry, it was the darndest thing… almost like he was fleeing!  Has he been caught up in some nasty business?", Rannos asked innocently.  Anyway, the players just missed Gremag, and Rannos was a smooth operator.  As the players were leaving, the paladin asked if he could detect evil on Rannos… in ACKS, detect evil works on humans if they have a chaotic alignment and evil intentions towards the caster.  Rannos's aura flashed evil to the paladin!  A bad guy got one over on them.  The paladin deemed he had no basis to attack Rannos, but he'd be on guard going forward.

It was too late to go back to camp so the players got rooms in the inn (in most cases a player character split a room with his or her henchperson).  Shakti's room had a bed for her and Sana and a cot for Captain Stephen.  When they awoke the next day, Captain Stephen was dead!  He'd been murdered in his sleep - his throat cut.  They players started an investigation but didn't get very far.  They eventually bought a lot of stuff from the garrulous and easy going "Bob the Peddler" who was also staying at the inn; they buried Captain Stephen outside of town and left Hommlet for their camp, eager to return to the dungeon before the end of the game session.

It's possible some of my players scan the blog from time to time, so I won't say how Captain Stephen was murdered.  DM's secret.

Later that game session, tragedy struck in the dungeon.  They entered a room where a portcullis trap fell at the entrance, splitting the party - the first two ranks of characters (the fighters) were in the vaulted chamber, while the support guys stuck on the far side of the portcullis.  Two of the player characters sprinted towards a door in the south of the vaulted chamber, to quickly see if there was a winch or lever in the room - whoops, it was full of ghouls.  The next round, the harpies up near the ceiling started singing.

So here's the situation - two fighters are standing in the doorway of a room containing 6 ghouls; the ghouls are alert because of the sound of the crashing portcullis.  Two more characters are still by the portcullis.  The other four characters are stuck on the far side of the portcullis.  Everyone had to make saves against the harpy songs, and half the group failed.  Both fighters in the doorway with the ghouls completely forgot about the undead once the harpies started yodeling… they turned their backs and started looking for the sound of those heavenly voices, somewhere lost in the columns high above.  Those two fighters fell quickly to a ghoul assault.  Ghoul paralysis is rough.

Some quick thinking by the players on the other side of the portcullis kept this from becoming a partial TPK.  Spugnoir, lost in the harpy-infused delirium, had two scrolls of protection vs undead (ward vs undead in ACKS terms) and a cooler headed character retrieved one and stuck it through the bars to Kayden, the thief on the other side.  Kayden was able to create a magic barrier against undead and push the monsters off the downed bodies of the fighters by moving into a defensive position near them.  He was joined by Killian, another henchman.

The ghouls were penned in their room by the ward vs undead, which now blocked the doorway, but the harpies fluttered down and attacked Killian and Kayden from the air.  Some of the characters back at the portcullis tried to shoot through the bars.  Kayden went down, the magic circle disappeared, and the ghouls were back in action, but the harpies were driven off or killed in the meantime, and the charm effects evaporated.  The trapped characters worked on lifting the portcullis.

Eventually, the second protection from undead scroll needed to be used to conjure a second barrier.  The henchman Killian had unwisely chosen to "rage" with the ACKS Berskergang feat, and he pursued the fleeing ghouls into the darkness against the player's better judgment.  He would eventually be slaughtered by the ghouls, outside of the safety of the magic circle.

Kayden was stabilized by the cleric, and the survivors decided to beat a retreat and regroup.  Mistakes were made this evening.

This was a tough one for the gang - 3 followers or henchmen gone.  Let's see how they bounce back next time!

ACKS Greyhawk 14: School in Session

I'm a few weeks behind on game reports.  My daughter graduated high school this spring, and I've been consumed the past few weeks with preparing for her epic graduation party, the gradpalooza. But gradpalooza is over, the relatives have all gone home, the house is back to normal and I can return to the trivial pursuits of life, like writing about roleplaying game sessions.

My players have had a rough couple of weeks.

For several weeks now they've been grinding their way through the Earth Temple flunkies on level 1 of the Temple of Elemental Evil.  They've had to deal with typical "Gygaxian defenses" - layers of foot soldiers with swordsmen backed up by polearms backed up by archers, with a few guys willing to throw flaming oil here and there.  You know deal, we've all seen Gary's style.  Gary was a war gamer at heart and his designs don't make it easy for folks whose only strategy is hack and slash.  (Me personally, I love the care he put into helping game masters with tactics).  However, a few well-placed Sleep spells can sure help tilt the playing field towards the players.

The player's fought their way through a literal gauntlet of human mooks, eventually penetrating a chamber with a few higher level lieutenants.  "Protect the clerics", one of them said, "Hold the line here".  The players knew they were on the verge of getting through to the bosses.

When the captain and lieutenant fell, the players warily eyed the barred door, beyond which presumably waited "the clerics".  Would they be high priests or skittish under clerics, unable to mount a serious defense?  A fierce table top discussion ensued.  The loudest voice was the one that said, "Let's retreat and rest, get all of our spells back, heal, and pick back up here when we're ready - on our time table".

Yeah, this is not a video game or a 5E dungeon.  The opponents are intelligent and are going to respond to incursions (or in this case their small army of mooks being slaughtered by invaders).  When the players returned after resting and healing outside of the dungeon, the cleric quarters were stripped clean - all their treasures and magic items taken away with the fleeing priests.  All that XP from gold escaped as well, making the mook battles even more pointless.

There was a gnashing of teeth and wailing.  Some recriminations amongst the players may have been spoken, and they had the taste of ashes in their mouths.  Large yawning chests mocked them with their emptiness, other than a few stray coins left behind in the hasty retreat.  A hard lesson was learned.

On a succeeding night, they cleared a large swath of the eastern portion of dungeon level 1.  The most interesting "encounter" involved a tomb door warded by glyphs.  Their NPC magic user was willing to knock the door (from a safe distance) but had no answer for the glyphs.  Shakti, the war priestess, convinced one of her NPC mooks to open the door, and he was blasted by cold magic and knocked unconscious.  They were able to stabilize him but his face and jaw were messed up.  (Since we're using ACKS for this one, there is a table of 'mortal wounds' to consider any time a character is rendered below zero hit points).

The tomb was full of niches with moldering, infected looking corpses.  Their paladin mused, "Hmmm - would a spore infection be a disease or a poison?  I haven't gotten to use my immunity to disease ability, so I'm going in…"  The corpses ended up being inanimate, not monsters lying in wait, although they were all diseased and would infect characters with a virulent respiratory illness.  The paladin was quite satisfied he was able to search the niches safely (protected by St Cuthbert's grace) while everyone else stayed safely away.

Game reports are caught up, at least until this weekend's game session, and next up we'll be taking a look at James Raggi's "Just a Stupid Dungeon" as I continue reviewing the LOTFP catalog.

ACKS Greyhawk: A Gnarley Interlude

A principal role of the dungeon master is to be an information dispenser - to feed the players stuff they can use to make decisions and exercise agency in the setting.  Most of the time that's going to come from narrative descriptions during exploration.  From time to time I'll put very brief "cut scenes" into my game when I want the players to know something their characters don't know - like foreshadowing.  I suppose it's not a very old school technique but I use it when there are interesting opposition characters that won't get a lot of screen time (before they die) and it makes their deaths more memorable.  Face it, module writers spend lots of time regaling the reader with their villain's backstories and plans, the players show up and are "I waste him with my crossbow."  The cut scenes let you get a little more value from those villains.  We're going to cover one of those situations tonight.

Several game sessions ago, the players left Hommlet with horses and carriages, camping and fishing gear, and canoes, and made a big show (in Hommlet) of making it seem they were going fishing - they said they'd be heading to the Nulb area to camp near the Imeryds Run, the river that flows out of the Gnarley Woods and through Nulb.

One of the first cut scenes - a 30 second blurb at the end of one of the game sessions a while ago - involved a mysterious hook nosed stranger, tall and cloaked, riding into Nulb and sauntering through the bat wing doors of the Waterside Hostel.  Mr Hook-nose sidled up to the bar and slipped some coins to the bartender, Dick Rentsch, for a whiskey and a question.  "Howdy, Dick, it's been a minute.  My duties have been keeping me away.  By chance have you seen a group of 'fishermen' come through town with wagons and canoes?"

A future cut scene involved Hook Nose hiring a group of disreputable Nulbian brigands, led by a hard luck mercenary captain (Captain Stephen), and another involved the captain and his motley crew of cutthroats setting out along the local roadways looking for Hook Nose's missing fishermen - their searches were fruitless.

Not sure if anyone else does stuff like that, I admit it's idiosyncratic.  But it give the players an ominous sense there are villains and NPC's out there moving against them without it being directly actionable.  Once in a while they'll kill a guy and be like, "oh man, you know who that actually was, it was the stupid priest plotting against us all this time.  I wasted him with my crossbow.  Bwah hah hah…"

Last game session saw the pay off related to one of these little side plots.  The players figured out which characters and NPCs were going on the adventure and set out again for the dungeon.  They canoed across the Imeryds Run and made their way out of the Gnarley Woods north towards the temple.  The two rangers in the group noticed a thin line of smoke across the river, looking west - on the same side of the river as the player's encampment.  Trouble.

The elven ranger, Glyndal, is in possession of an elven cloak and is very hard to detect in the wilds.  He crept through the rushes at the river's edge to spy on the other side.  A dozen or so grubby brigands were setting up a small camp on the far side.  A few officers on horseback sauntered around the camp… the commander nudged his horse down the waterline for a drink.  "I do like to be out in the field on maneuvers - reminds me of my time in the army", he said with a drawl.

The players decided to bail on the dungeon excursion, went back to the forest to their canoes, and prepared the camp for a possible attack.  They didn't set up any traps or ambushes on the approach between the brigands and where the player encampment was down river a few miles… a pair of brigand scouts went into the woods mid-afternoon, and almost got away with the location of the player camp.  After killing the scouts, no one in the player group made the connection that forward scouts would be missed at some point, and the brigand commander would move his force into the woods looking for them.  So glorious battle was had after all!  Huzzah!

No, that's not quite right.  The camp's magic user had a full bevvy of sleep spells and the brigands were eliminated with very little bloodshed (or glory).  Captain Stephen was surrounded, surrendered, and proved to have little loyalty to the man who hired him, "a dislikable fellow that went by the name of Gremag - though he seemed well known to the folks that ran the Waterside Hostel up in Nulb…" 

Although we haven't been back to Hommlet for many game sessions, at least one of the players remembered a Gremag as a proprietor of the trading post - they've sold a lot of dungeon gear back to the traders.  Next week will likely see a trip back to Hommlet.

I have to check my Greyhawk calendar - in the T1 module, there's a mention that a high level assassin will travel to the area looking for those who killed the New Master below the moathouse some 5-20 days later, and I know I rolled it and put it out there - it has to be coming up soon.  You have to plan all that stuff out on a calendar to be a fair dealer.  For instance - I already knew when the brigands of Captain Stephen would come to the player's area and start searching the woods, it was already on the calendar.  Had the players chosen to do something different that day (like go back to Hommlet early) maybe the brigands would have come upon a camp filled with a half dozen zero level guards; they'd kill everyone, steal the players loot.  The players would get back and cry foul - but no, it was on the calendar that way all along, you just picked a bad day to leave your camp.  Sorry.  Keeping a good calendar avoids conflicts of interest and illusionism.  So with any luck, a certain foul-tempered assassin will be showing up in Hommlet about the same time the players want to settle their unfinished business with Gremag.

Post script - our cast of characters

I have 8 or 9 players on the distribution list, but we typically get 3-4 available for any given game session.  This week we had the following folks:

Barfred - L3 paladin of St Cuthbert

Shakti - L3 priestess of a war goddess, wants to build an army to cleanse the world.

Sana - L1 henchman of Shakti, a religious fanatic (fighter)

Glyndal - L3 elven ranger (archer) from the Gnarley Woods.

Kayden - thief - Glyndal's L2 henchman

NPCs

Elmo - Hommlet's rock star ranger.

Spugnoir - an NPC from Hommlet, he who puts bad guys to sleep.

Jack - a zero-level guy rescued from the dungeon, kitted out like a champion with recovered equipment.

A player typically controls Spugnoir (and we've had guests run him) but ideally the players will out-level him and he can become a henchman.  Elmo is getting ready to have other missions that take his attention elsewhere, he's too much of a Mary Sue to let the players keep him around as a crutch - the module advises he may accompany the first several times into the temple dungeons and then recede.

Okay - until next time!

ACKS Greyhawk Report: Dungeon Level 1

We’ve had four game sessions exploring the first dungeon level of the Temple of Elemental Evil and the players have explored most of the southern half of the map.  The game sessions are usually two and half hours when they land on Sunday night (we all have early mornings) although we'll stretch them to three or four hours if we switch game night to a Friday or Saturday.

One of the more interesting game nights we've had in the dungeon involved an escalating series of "ghoul fights".  The players discovered a prison room with a bunch of manacled, naked people; while they're talking to the hysterical prisoners and figuring out how to get them free, the ghouls in an adjacent room step out to see who is messing with their food supply, and away we went.  Each room in the chain had another 6 ghouls, so the melee quickly got out of hand with a fresh wave of ghouls joining the fight.

A few magic items from the moat house dungeon played a significant role.  One of them was a clerical phylactery of action - the player had no idea what it did, but it made him immune to paralysis, including the touch of a ghoul.  (Although I got confused which cleric was wearing the phylactery and bestowed the bonus on the wrong cleric - oops.  Yeah, that was a big miss).  The other item was a potion of undead control, which allowed the players to bolster their fighting force with a handful of charmed ghouls.  It was a giant glorious ripping and shredding ghoul fight.  When it was all done, they killed eighteen ghouls, a couple of ghasts, and needed to get a dozen or so naked people back to the surface.

The grindiest fight we experienced was verse an elite cadre of earth temple warriors, clad in bronze plate mail, facing off against the player front line (also in plate mail) with everyone needing 17's or 18's and higher to hit each other.  The players used the time-honored tactic of front line melee fighters, spear-wielders in the second rank, and it felt like a dungeon-sized version of a Roman phalanx.  All of their sleep spells were exhausted earlier that night, and this one came down to morale rolls and hit points and keeping the fighters healed.  I was surprised tension and engagement stayed high, but it was an exciting session and the group enjoyed the battle of attrition.

I'm finding that combat without miniatures or tokens lets us get through 4-6 encounters in an evening of dungeon crawling.  It's a huge change from 5E.  Old school "sleep" is a terrifying weapon in the player's hands, amplified when we play shorter game sessions.  I'm fine with it, the tyranny of sleep shall pass in a few game levels.  Module writers don't put nearly enough level 1 magic users in their settings to give the players a taste of their own medicine.  Every dungeon needs some weaselly wizards with a sleep or two and some daggers ready to sleep and slice.

I did have to give the group a variant of the "lawful stupid" speech.  Some members of the party took great pains to find robes and garb to be able to disguise themselves like dungeon inhabitants (earth temple cultists) so they could try some parleys; when they finally found a room where this tactic could work, the characters in the front were like, "I'm a paladin, I'm not skulking in a disguise" or a cleric would say "We don't talk to cultists, we kill them, it's my alignment", and suddenly it's "roll for initiative" and the other half of the group is dragged into a combat - so much for the talk first plan.  It's not my place to tell the group how to play, but it is the DM's place to clarify the rules and how things like alignment work in the game world.

For instance, I'm using a simple lawful-neutral-chaotic axis - law stands for defending the realms of man.  I'm giving the paladin and cleric players great leeway to determine their character's strictures and religion, so if a player wants to play "St Cuthbert needs us to exterminate every inhabitant of the Temple of Elemental Evil" that's their choice, it's not something the DM is foisting on them as an alignment straitjacket.  They could just as easily make the choice that law calls for them to eliminate just the evil clerics leaders, or just the supernatural evil beings like demons, and let the mooks and goons slink off.

We talked about this out of game at the start of the next session.  I suggested they chat as a group about their goals for the dungeon how they want to play - would they ever use stealth, roleplaying, and subterfuge, or is everyone on board with the "kill them all, let the gods sort them out" attitude of the zealots.  The players had a good conversation and the zealots agreed to give the roleplayers a chance to talk their way out of some encounters, or befriend some dungeon inhabitants to collect information.

We worked through these issues and more during sessions 9, 10, 11, and 12; next ACKS report will be game 13 and I'll include details on the specific characters, choices, tactics, and players.  Until next time.

ACKS Greyhawk: From Hommlet to Nulb

Here's the area map of Hommlet and Nulb referenced in the post:

One of the issues the players must contend with as they shift from exploring the Moat House to the Temple of Elemental Evil is the distance between Hommlet and Nulb.  The Temple of Elemental Evil is that little rectangle south of Nulb.  Since each hex is about 10 leagues or 30 miles, it's a full day back and forth between the dungeon and safety in Hommlet.

Nulb is a raucous, lawless pirate town.  The area is too remote from the town of Verbobonc, 3 solid days away, for the laws of Verbobonc to carry much weight in the area.  The population consists of scoundrels, brigands, and river pirates.  Staying in Nulb is possible for the player characters, but could be challenging for parties containing "lawful stupid" characters, and our player character group is full of clerics and paladins.  Cover up my plate mail so the locals can't see I'm a paladin?  That's nonsense!  So the cooler heads decided the party probably shouldn't stay in Nulb.  (Several games into exploring the dungeon, the players have re-thought the whole problem of stealth and being undercover and are taking a more circumspect approach to exploring, so lawful stupid can be fixed).

They considered rebuilding the moathouse, and even appealed to Lord Burne of Hommlet for dispensation to restore it and turn it into a hangout - he's considering their request.  It's a bit remote for their purposes of having a safe place to retire between adventures - it's only an hour or two outside of Hommlet.  One of my rules for this campaign is that the players need to start and end each session in a safe place so we can support episodic play and allow people to drop in as available.  The player roster is up to 9 players, but it's not uncommon to fire up a game night with only 3 or 4 players available, so the cast can change week to week.

Their ultimate solution?  They decided to build their own wilderness camp.  They were rolling in cash after overthrowing the New Master and claiming some bounties for ridding the moat house of bandits.  The players bought wagons, horses, some mercenary retainers, tents, supplies, even a few canoes.  They avoided Nulb entirely, staying within the Gnarley Woods and camping on the western side of Imeryds Run, the small river flowing through Nulb.  I'm a stickler for tracking rations, consumable supplies like torches and oil and arrows, using marching orders, night watches, and so on.  Strict time records must be kept!  Google Docs has become the player's friend.

It took two game sessions for the players to figure out the camp logistics, set up camp, and explore the Temple surface ruins (outer works) and then explore the Temple itself above ground.  They astutely chose to stay away from the tower in the north east of the ruins, and haven't been back there yet.  (Anyone familiar with T1-4 probably knows the tower - it's a Gygaxian locale that can slaughter an inexperienced group).  Inside the temple they discovered at least 4 ways down into the dungeons beneath the site.  I'll pick up with their first forays into the dungeons next time and these game reports will get up to date.

ACKS Greyhawk: Hommlet and the Moathouse

We agreed upon a reasonable backstory for the adventuring party - the merchant guildmaster of the town of Verbobonc (Mistress Fernhall) had fielded complaints of expensive shipments of trade goods from the Elven kingdom of Celene  going missing in the vicinity of a small village in the south of the Viscounty.  The Viscount's steward authorized a bounty of 10gp per head for any bandits brought to justice, dead or alive.  The players each came up with a good reason why their fresh-faced level 1 character wanted to hunt bandits and earn some money, and we were off and running - the sleepy village, Hommlet was a 3 day's ride south of Verbobonc 

Looking at my Greyhawk  calendar, the players spent 7 game sessions adventuring in and around Hommlet.  First there was arriving in the village, seeing the sights, meeting people at the inn, the church, the trader's, the druid's grove, and eventually presenting their writ of bounty to Lord Burne, the erstwhile liege lord of the area.  Neither Burn nor his guard commander, Rufus, were aware of bandits or missing caravans, although Rufus suggested it'd been some years since anyone had ventured out to the ruins of the old moathouse a few miles outside of town.  Ruins, you say?  We specialize in ruins, said our characters, and they were soon off to investigate their first dungeon.

If you're not familiar with the Temple of Elemental Evil, as my players were not, they learned the local history along the way.  A decade back, an epic battle between the forces of Law and Civilization, led by the Viscount of Verbobonc, with allied armies from the northern kingdoms, members of the knightly orders, and friendly forces of elves and gnomes from the nearby Gnarley Woods and Kron Hills, fought a significant pitched battle about a day's march away at a place called Emridy Meadows.  A varied force of evil soldiers, wicked clerics, humanoids, and monsters, had vomited forth from a vast dungeon and evil temple nearby, to bring Chaos and destruction to the countryside.

The armies of Chaos were routed, the evil temple was defeated, the dungeons (supposedly) cleared, and ancient evils locked away once more.  The moathouse near Hommlet was a smaller outpost from the Temple of Elemental Evil, overthrown via siege in the aftermath of the temple's fall.  Two of the player characters were members of the Church of St Cuthbert, the local dominant religion, and they knew this history well - the church's spiritual leader, the Patriarch Serten, was one of Law's casualties in the fight against the temple's forces, and clerics and paladins of St Cuthbert memorialized Serten's sacrifice.

This adventure, the T1 Village of Hommlet was originally published for AD&D back in 1979 and written by Gygax, later to be joined in a campaign book called T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil, written by Frank Mentzer with access to Gygax and his notes.  T1 is a solid introductory adventure, although the 1970's edition always felt like a teaser, alluding to the nearby temple and a much grander story - alas, we'd have to wait until 1985(!) to see the full thing.

I'm going to elide the play-by-play and focus on the big picture in these summarized recaps.  The players spent several sessions exploring the upper ruins of the moathouse, facing over-sized swamp critters and discovering that bandits were indeed lurking in the ruins.  Sadly, the bandits did not have any of the rare elven trade goods, so the players surmised there was another factor.  The dungeon beneath the moathouse yielded a further mystery.  The characters discovered secret stores of arms and equipment, evidence that someone other than the bandits was using the dungeon as a staging area for future military action.  They found monstrous humanoids lurking in those dark chambers - gnolls, bugbears, and even a man-slaying ogre.  Ultimately they faced off against a small force of mercenary humans led by a powerful, evil cleric - the New Master.  Among the spoils in the master's treasury they found the rare elven wines and crystals, the missing trade goods and luxury items from Celene.

The master's forces had black garb embroidered with the crimson eye of fire, one of the many evil symbols worn by the forces of the Temple a decade ago, and recorded in the annals of the Church.  In the aftermath of the exploration of the moathouse, the players convinced the village council evidence pointed back to the cult of Elemental Evil.  The threat posed by the cult of elemental evil endured and was once again creeping forth to threaten the countryside.  The players made schemes to carry their explorations to the temple ruins themselves… but we'll cover those next time.

There are a few more points to make.  First, agents of evil had infiltrated the village, and some of them even joined the player group, seeking to betray them at opportune moments.  One such agent was the mercenary Zert, who tried to keep the players from returning to Hommlet with evidence of the crimson eye of fire.  There are other agents still in Hommlet the players haven't discovered yet.

One of their allies, the beefy farmhand Elmo, turned out to be an agent of good, serving the Viscount of Verbobonc himself.  The players would never have survived the moathouse without Elmo's sturdy axe and copious hit points.  At the end of these adventures, Elmo recused himself to report to his superiors in Verbobonc, and has vacated the story for the time being.  The party also relied heavily on an NPC mage, the greedy wizard Spugnoir.

Let's meet the players - our cast of player characters includes the Cuthbert worshippers Brother Grayson (cleric), and Barfred (paladin); a fighter Randolph; an Elven Ranger, Glyndal; an exotic scimitar-wielding priestess of a foreign deity, the temple dancer Shakti.  Several of them reached level 3 by the end of the moathouse, but the others are trailing based on attendance.  In future games they added Magnus, a mage, and Dunne, a whiskey distiller who happens to be able to fight, along with various henchmen and mercenary hirelings.  Casualties during this arc were relegated to hirelings, NPCs, and mercenaries, although there have been some lucky saving throws, and Barfred was mauled by a giant lizard, leading to some permanent scars (courtesy of the ACKS mortal wounds table).  Until next time!

How'd We Get Back to Greyhawk?

I won't spill a lot of ink on our decision to put 5E on the bench.  It had gotten a bit boring for me, the players weren't challenged, and complex battles had gotten tedious.  We don't play long game session, just a few hours, so it wouldn't be uncommon for intricate 5E battles to stretch over multiple nights.  I missed the fast and furious nature of OSR gaming.  They're all solvable problems, but at some point it's just easier to use rules that already lean into the style you want.  WOTC's attempts to revoke the OGL was the final trigger - I decided I'd either play games we already own or put my money behind the independent publishers of the industry.

We had some discussions and took votes, both on a choice of setting and campaign inspiration, and then which rules to use.  For setting and theme, we discussed a LOTFP style horror sandbox, an OSR megadungeon, or AD&D classic hits.  (Classic hits won, I'm going to call it the Tour de Gygax).  To me that meant Greyhawk - but which rules set?  Of course we put out their AD&D (OSRIC), classic D&D (Labyrinth Lord), or perhaps a modern clone like LOTFP or ACKS.  The player's picked ACKS - several of them liked it from back in the day.  The characters are a little more powerful and have a lot of options; I like the whole domain end-game possibilities, which I loved from AD&D and which other clones overlook.  Historically, we've had several long running LOTFP games (Gothic Greyhawk and the Black City come to mind), and used ACKS for an extended Dwimmermount campaign.  I was a little sad they didn't pick the low-powered horror sandbox, but I'm sure we'll strap on those flintlocks and rapiers and get in some LOTFP style games here and there.

Greyhawk, however, is an awesome setting.  For me it brings to mind the wonder and mystery of first discovering AD&D back in the 70's and 80's, before you knew what an elemental was, or a rust monster or a mind flayer.  The original Greyhawk books are idiosyncratic - they go into great detail on things like coats of arms for obscure principalities, weather patterns, the migration routes of ancient humans, and random encounter tables by geography, without telling you much about any meta story or what to do with the setting.  It's an open invitation to create your version of Greyhawk.  Our last Greyhawk campaign cast the Earldom of Sterich as a mist-ridden backwater filled with haunted moors, howling werewolves, and vampire's castles.  This time around we're leaning into a Lord of the Ring's vibe; fractious human kingdoms struggle with alliances and politics while forgotten evils creep back into the light of day to threaten Law and Civilization.  What role will the players have in rekindling old alliances or ensuring slumbering evils never awaken?

The only significant house rule is that every week, the players are committed to leaving whatever dungeon they're exploring and returning to a safe place, be it town or wilderness camp, where they have supplies, a place to rest, and the missing player characters and henchmen.  In this way we can roll with whoever is available to play the following week.  I like the inspiration mechanic introduced by 5E (where players can earn an extra die roll by doing something inspirational) so we're still using that one - it's already blunted the hard edge of some save or die rolls back in Hommlet's moathouse.  Players can nominate each other for inspiration for good roleplaying, tactics, flooring the table with a fine joke or quip, that kind of stuff - but the DM's say is final.  We use 3d6 in order for attributes, but let the players roll 5 sets of ability scores and pick the set of scores that best fit the character they want to make.

We never returned to in-person gaming after the pandemic.  Several of my long time players moved out of town, and using a virtual table top and video conference capability has been too useful to stay connected.  It's easy to scan old map images from TSR-era modules into roll20, obscure them with fog of war, and then leverage online maps and dice rolling.  However, we are not using tokens at this time, just "theater of the mind".  I'm really trying to avoid slow tactical combat after too many years of 5E, and I'm loathe to reintroduce miniatures… maybe later.  We use a discord voice and video channel for communications, and the players make good use of google documents for sharing notes, marching orders, communal supplies (like their campsite gear), posting images, tracking names and henchmen, that kind of stuff.  We don't get to share pizza, doritos, and pepsi, but otherwise online gaming has been pretty good.

I’ll put a couple summaries together of our first few months of Greyhawking to get caught up on the game reports - that'll be for during the week.