It's been a minute since I've posted here at the Dream House. My corporate alter ego has been busy - my company is merging with a French business, and acquisitions are busy times anyone in IT. It's been good though, I've enjoyed visiting Reims and trying to pick up French. My gaming group has been diligent about maintaining the LOTFP campaign, and the players have a few new adventures under their belts. Let's get caught up with "The Pillories".
By way of refresher, this campaign is centered around the city of York in 1630. There's a healthy number of LOTFP early-modern adventures either directly placed in England or easy enough to put there, such that there's no lack of interesting things for adventurers to do. The player character patrons have included a local crime lord, Billy Brewer, a mysterious figure named Garvin Richrom, and a collector of rare things called "The Doctor". The Doctor was introduced in person last game report, and he's since hired the characters to retrieve a valuable codex from a secret vault of the Catholic church (the locale of The God That Crawls).
Our characters include Pastor Blackburn, a Solomon Kane-like puritan monster hunter; Remi and Yuri, a halfling burglar and elf wanderer; Toby and Wood, the two henchmen; the group's leader is Allister, an Oxford scholar and dabbler in the mystic arts (a magic user). They call themselves The Pillories. The campaign is basically a "best of" for old LOTFP including Tower of the Stargazer, the Grinding Gear, and now The God That Crawls. (On the near horizon sits Strict Time Records Must Be Kept and then Death Frost Doom).
The group traveled to Dover, stayed at an inn and got their bearings, before going to Shepperdswell, a small hamlet that was home to the parish church beneath which were the lost Catholic vaults filled with terrible secrets and dangerous items. The Pillories met the pastor of the church, Father Bacon, and be-friended a local farmer who let them stay in his barn for a night. It was Halloween night, and they ended up infiltrating the vaults through a hill-side entrance and quickly got lost in the tunnels. There was lots of screaming and running through a maze while they were tracked by an immortal shoggoth-like monster, the "god that crawls".
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| A few of our artist's renditions of 'the god' chasing the characters |
After a lot of trial and error with mapping and figuring out how to navigate the maze, they found a circular shaft leading up into the church. Unfortunately, right after two of the characters climbed up and out, the monster came along and chased the rest of the group away from the exit. So they got split up - two characters (Toby and Yuri) were up in the church, while everyone else plunged back into the dark maze, trying to outpace the monster. It was great fun. It eventually devolved into a full fiasco when dawn broke and the party still hadn't reconnected, but now the thief and elf needed to deal with people waking up in the church and finding intruders. The next day was All-Saints Day and there would be a mid-day service in a couple of hours with all the villagers coming to church as well.
All's well that ends well. The other players finally got out of the maze, the Father and his acolytes were put to Sleep, the Father was Charmed, and the players concocted a story about being agents of the church sent to verify the secrets were safe, and what a great job Father Bacon was doing keeping it all secret and safe. They had their book they were sent to recover, the Father was calmed down before mid-day services, and they were able to head out without anyone summoning the nearby nobility and law enforcement. They did collect a bunch of other "weird items" to mess with in the future, but never did find the secret vault with the overpowered artifacts. However, they left with a map and have resolved to come back at a later time to see where it leads.
I never ran this one years ago when it first came out, and wasn't sure how the whole "chased by a monster in a maze" would play out at the table. It worked remarkably well in actual play and wasn't hard to manage as the referee. I don't think I gave it enough credit back in the day, and we truly had a grand time. Most classic D&D or fantasy game adventures fall short when it comes to mazes and getting lost, but James Raggi did a fine job with maze construction on The God That Crawls and designing an interesting setting around it.
My players are scattered about these days, so we're playing online using a virtual table top, which makes manipulating maps and revealing / hiding sections of a map easy with online tools. I have both physical books and PDFs for most adventures, so while I'm referencing a print copy for myself and flipping pages, I use the PDF in advance to create images of the maps and load them into the virtual table top for the online gaming and mapping. The referee does need to do some prep work on the maps hiding secret things and whatnot, which is my biggest accommodation switching from books designed for in-person gaming to online gaming. I wonder, post-COVID, how many groups actually went back to 100% in-person play?
To wrap up, this one is about being chased by a shoggoth-like monster through a multi-level dungeon maze while trying to find some horribly unfair cursed items. If that sounds like an enjoyable proposition, this adventure delivers the goods. There's enough weird history and tie-in to the real world of the setting that it was reminiscent to me of a Call of Cthulhu adventure, but playable with familiar d20 mechanics and classic fantasy classes and rules. The God that Crawls - an old one but good one.
Next time we'll turn our attention to a much newer adventure, Kelvin Green's Strict Time Records Must Be Kept. Stay tuned.