Game Reports - York 1630 and ACKS Greyhawk

I'm a few weeks behind on game reports - so today is a two-for-one.

York 1630 (Lamentations of the Flame Princess)

At the end of last game session, the players were seriously depleted after battling about a dozen "mosquito bats" (stirges in your BX parlance).  They were exploring an abandoned inn, The Grinding Gear, and the mosquito bats were nesting in the attic.

The players secured themselves in an upstairs room away from the bats and bandaged themselves, healed as best they could, and rested.  Their fighter, a 30 years war vet, is also a medic.  In the morning, they hatched a plan to remove the bats from the attic - they smoked them out!  They created a smoky fire with oil-soaked rags in a cook pot and opened the trap door into the attic just enough to slide the smoke pot onto the attic floor.  Their stealthy halfling crept out of the front of the inn where he could spy the smoke billowing out of the attic hole, and he watched as the flocks of mosquito bats fled into the nearby forest to escape the smoke.

When the coast was clear, the players put a lid on the smoking pot, retrieved the treasure from the attic, and found a place to hide it in the inn before considering their next move - finding the underground tomb complex they believed was in the area.  The one thing they hadn't fully inspected yet was the statue in the courtyard, the one surrounded by a field of drained bodies, and they suspected the tomb entrance was tied to the statue.

Since the players experienced the mosquito bats in the attic, they surmised that's how the bodies around the statue became drained; they just didn't understand the mechanism.  So there was some trial and error, with one person going forward to mess with the statue (the halfling) while the rest of the party stayed far away and watched.  In this way they were able to observe the statue's sleep gas trap, and how the smell of the gas coaxed mosquito bats out of the woods to slake their thirst on the sleeping victim(s).  They were able to save the halfling and use the trap door in the statue's base to get into the dungeon.

The most interesting thing that's happened in the dungeon so far was when they discovered a barred door - an NPC party was hiding in the room.  "Don't come through the door or we'll sleep you - we have a wizard!" they warned through the door.  None of the players had considered this was a thing that could happen… that there could be NPC magic users, and opposing magic users could have sleep spells too, and the entire party of first level heroes could be put to sleep and knifed in a dungeon.  Yikes!

The elf player whispered to his companions, "Don't worry - elves can't be put to sleep.  They don't know about me.  Start chopping it down!"  Our party's artist captured the moment when "The Pillories", as they're called, chopped through the door and the elf put the 3 humans in the room to sleep anyway.

ACKS Greyhawk - Temple of Elemental Evil

The best news about our Greyhawk game is that we held it.  We missed a bunch of weeks due to scheduling issues and attendance.  The core group is now on board with a bi-weekly cadence, which works perfectly with a bi-weekly LOTFP game.  This way the regulars should be able to make all the games going forward.

Otherwise there hasn't been a lot to report lately! The players are obsessed with grinding their way through all of level 1, exploring everything, and indulging their completionism urges.  This can be the bane of running a megadungeon (or in this case, large dungeon).  However, I'm hopeful they've learned enough about level 2 to head down there soon.

Last game they also discovered one of the final roleplaying oriented encounters on level 1 - the torturer and his bugbear sidekick.  The thief heard an active 'torture session' in progress through the door, and the players were able to get the jump on the torturer.  A mercenary on the rack cried out for help, the hapless farmers in the prison cells cried out for help, and the torturer was willing to parley after a sleep spell put the bugbear down (the torturer was level 5, unaffected by sleep, but outnumbered like 8 to 1, and he failed a morale check).

The paladin honored his promise to the torturer of safe passage in return for answers, keys, and freeing all the prisoners.  The players learned a back way down to level 2, as well as the location of more prisoners.  The torturer scooted off, the players freed the mercenary and the prisoners, and their militant "bladedancer" - a cleric trying to build an army for the goddess of war - made a recruitment pitch to the mercenary to join her budding force.  (The player rolled terribly on the reaction roll and the mercenary declined - "I ain't in this for your revolution, princess".)  This is why they usually let the paladin recruit the survivors.  But then the mooks are more loyal to the broader group than Shakti's weird crusade for the war goddess (Shakti is the bladedancer).

The torturer had given them some bad advice (mean people suck) and some of the "prisoners" he directed them towards were actually zombies in cells - but were easily handled with clerics and old school Turn Undead.  One of the cells had an actual living prisoner, a gnome named Wonnilon, who desperately wanted to find his gear, but the night was getting late and the players had to leave the dungeon for the night.  Wonnilon left with them, with the promise they'd finish looking for his gear the following week.

Final thought - it's interesting running two different OSR-derived games at the same time (bi-weekly) and seeing the nuances in them (and how their rules sets compliment the subtle differences in the expected game play).  Both ACKS and LOTFP are not true clone games but rather include strong authorial voices and design philosophies.  Grist for a future post.