Retrospective and Review - Strict Time Records Must Be Kept

The premise of Strict Time Records Must Be Kept is that the player characters have been dosed with a slow-acting, fatal poison while isolated in a trap-filled mansion, where they search for doses of antidote.  The set up involves a wealthy patron betraying the group, ostensibly to create entertainment value for haughty, wealthy guests.  When I conceived the concept of the York LOTFP campaign, a year ago, I sketched a spine for the campaign that included a wealthy patron that could play the role of "the Doctor" and invite them to his mountain home for the fatal meal.  Starting with Tower of the Stargazer back at level 1, the Doctor has been in the background, arranging jobs, sending them letters of encouragement and small gifts, and ultimately hiring them to raid the church vaults detailed in The God That Crawls.  Now they were invited to the Doctor's remote mountain home for a fabulous meal, a well-earned reward, and a chance to hear where the Doctor's glorious plans were leading.  They were completely blind-sided when he announced to them over dinner that they'd all been poisoned.

Here's the scene:  the players traveled several days to the Doctor's mansion, where they were put up in one of the many small cabins surrounding the estate, and they arrived in time for the big dinner, dressed in formal attire (meaning limited armor, limited weapons).  They mingled with the Doctor's rich friends as "guests of honor" while the first courses were served in the dining room.  Uniformed servants with bone-white masks painted with red dots on their cheeks moved amongst the room re-filling glasses and placing the main courses.  The Doctor began to talk about his "great project", for which the player characters were being paid in gold for the part they played... Two of the masked servants brought a coffer to the end of the table to show off the player's reward, payment for retrieving a Roman text from The God That Crawls.

The Doctor's creepy servants

"There's just one thing", the Doctor said, after tinking a glass to get everyone's attention.  "I'm not going to get into the details of the project until later, after tonight's entertainment.  Let me tell you about the entertainment... my honored guests, the Pillories, have all been poisoned.  Their entrees were laced with a tasteless concoction of my own devising, which will kill them all painfully in 12 hours.  However, in the interest of fair play and sport, there are antidotes in small vials that look like this..." and the Doctor held up an empty vial, "hidden around the mansion or locked away in nefarious puzzles.  And we get to watch them stumble around looking for the vials while their symptoms get worse."

"Except for you, Ignazio - I poisoned you as well, because we needed a demonstration."  At that point, one of the rich guests started violently convulsing and went through a wave of gross symptoms, previewing for the players what would befall them over the next 12 hours.  "His dose was far more virulent than the rest of you, you still have 12 more hours.  Chop chop."

So that's more or less how you kick this one off.  One of the rich guests got sick and fled the room (Sergio Ortega).  Dame Thatcher started laughing uncontrollably at the character's predicament with tears streaming out of her eyes, and the Dread Pirate Roberts put some money down betting that the adventurers would all make it out alive.  The players said "Screw all you guys, we cast SLEEP."

In our version, the rich guests never got the chance to spectate as the characters stumbled around the mansion because their unconscious bodies were all trussed and bound in the dining chamber.  Captain Roberts wasn't affected by SLEEP (too high level) so he wished the characters well; he was going to retrieve his things from the upstairs and potentially help them if they met up again.  His NPC arc didn't work out as he hoped; his room was trapped with a blunderbuss, he took a chest-full of shot, and he also ended up with a heightened dose of poison.  He crossed paths with the players a few times as they explored the mansion, but once it was clear to him he was caught in the Doctor's poisoned web and experiencing spiraling symptoms, he returned to the dining hall and slew the bound socialites before melting from the poison - not just mostly dead, but dead-dead.

As if all this doesn't sound fun enough, the servants and hunting hounds out in the yard were all dosed with rage-inducing drugs and would jump-scare the players from around corners or behind doors as they crept through the mansion looking for antidote.

Strict time keeping is a recurring feature in these LOTFP adventures, whether it was managing light and food in The Grinding Gear or plotting the course of the slime monster turn-by-turn in The God That Crawls.  Here, the countdown takes on ominous life as the players begin to dread the tolling of the hours which signal the next wave of saving throws against ever-more debilitating poison symptoms.  Pressure builds as the players try to cover more ground in the house, even as their characters lose function.  Every time they succeeded in finding an antidote dose, there would be a tense moment around the table as they tried to justify who should take it, based on a combination of saving throws, symptoms, who had the most valuable skills, and so on.  (They ended up saving their Specialist first).

The Pillories eventually found the Doctor's secret lab in the basement, where they were able to synthesize the final antidote that was needed using the Doctor's notes.  They rescued someone named Geoff from the Doctor's prison, and Pastor Blackburn recruited him to be a henchman, setting up an interesting future problem when they rescue the next Geoff down the line and I need to decide if all the Geoff prisoners are clones.  By morning, the players had survived the poison, the rage-servants had died of heart attacks after the rage drugs wore off, and the wealthy patrons were either killed by the vengeful Captain Roberts or taken out by other traps within the house.  We had a post-mortem game session where the players took the next 6 months or so of game time leveraging the deed of the house and several adventure's worth of loot to fix it up, hire all sorts of staff, and claim the mountain retreat as their new headquarters.  They transported their library from York to the house in the Pennines and the spell casters used the time for magic research... including researching a "Comprehend Languages" spell so they could decipher a certain cryptic set of writings on a cave face deep beneath the Doctor's house, where a skeleton made of stone was half emerged from the rock face.  If you own this adventure, you know the room I'm talking about, and the players laughed for several minutes about how close they came to letting the halfling smear blood all over the thing the first time they found the room, before they knew what the inscription meant.  Their halfling, Remi, has leveraged his robust saving throws to become the party's instigator.  Every campaign needs someone willing to pull levers and stir the pot.

We had a lot of fun with this one, as far as a review rating that's the best thing to say about an adventure - it was well worth our time.  It was a little challenging managing all of the NPCs early on in the first evening, but that got sorted out fairly early.  I knew this would be a central fixture in the campaign and introduced the Doctor, and his manservants, early in the York campaign.  During the lead up, they knew the Doctor was eccentric and weird, and didn't trust him, but didn't distrust him enough to refuse a dinner invitation and chance to collect their money.  But I think Strict Time Records Must Be Kept could work even better with a convention game, where the referee could be stingy on the number of antidotes and see who survives at the end.

Like many of Kelvin's adventures, there are gratuitous puns and pop culture references which break up the horror and give momentary relief to the tension.  An example was the room of chains and hooks with the metal puzzle box, with its razor sharp edges, holding an antidote... my players are all products of 1980's horror movies and started quoting the original Hellraiser, "We have such sights to show you" and "Your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell" and that kind of stuff while someone wrestled with the puzzle.

Speaking of movie references, one of their favorite moments (captured in the sketch below) is when they discovered the Doctor's henchmen had captured one of their friends from York, a homeless chap that lived in their alley they called "Sandwich Sam", and the Doctor sewed something into Same's abdomen (a box with an antidote).  They were fond of Sam and had to weigh attempting a surgery vs keeping Sam alive... they ended up doing the surgery but using magic to keep Sam alive.  (Unfortunately Sam was murdered later in one of the game sessions by a homicidal butler).

This one was a great adventure, with an interesting premise, that made great use of time pressure, and I had enough forethought to incorporate it naturally into the campaign backstory.  Physically the book is a high quality LOTFP hardcover, 80 pages, with art, maps, and writing by Kelvin Green.  I find Kelvin's puns and culture references entertaining to read and fun to work into the game, so his adventures work for me, and this might be the best of the bunch.  It was certainly the adventure I was most excited to put through campaign play first.  The other one that's definitely in our future is Bee-Ware, since Ambersham Mead has been a recurring game reference since the early days of this campaign.  The players even re-opened a tavern near the new mansion property and want to stock it with Ambersham, necessitating a visit in the near future.

As for the campaign York 1630, in the long months they were rebuilding the mansion and making it their own, the players deciphered the Doctor's notes and fully read the book they bought for him, the Words of the Dead.  Between the account of the Roman legate, and the medieval notes the Doctor had gathered, they determined the holdfast of the ancient death cult was at a place called Cold Mountain somewhere north of Carlisle, in Scotland.  It's there they will pierce the ancient cult's secrets of immortality and finish the Doctor's "great project".  Next game report, we'll recount how they set off to begin Death Frost Doom (now in the year 1631).