Black City Game 3

CAST OF CHARACTERS
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior
Uther of Alfheim, an elf
Shamus  Bloodstar, a Gaelic wizard
Mulnar, a Northman cleric
Falki, a Northman specialist

Retainers:
Arthur the Fair
Bjorn Fjordrunner
Skoldig
Visin the Frey Cleric
Twig-Belly

"Let's hope the wizard is clearly interested in this alien skull", was a common sentiment with the party, as they stood in line outside the wizard's tower.

"Wizard's tower, wtf?  I thought this campaign is on some frozen island in the arctic circle?", you may ask.  Well, yes it is, but apparently that hasn't stopped an enterprising magician from far Arabia from building a tower in sheltered valley not far from Trade Town.  He pays good silver for alien relics, they say.  The popular rumor is that he's carried back and forth on the winds by his enslaved djinns.

So we resumed play with the party stamping their feet in the cold air, waiting on line outside the wizard's tower.  They suffered the boasting of Brand the Red, another petitioner at the wizard's place, whose group 'The Wolf Cloaks' had recovered a golden disc from the ruins, a flat circle covered in weird dots.  "This is writing," he said, "And this is what the wizard pays for.  He's going to laugh at your stupid box."  If there was some sand nearby, Brand would have tried to kick it in their faces.

The inside of the tower was oppressively hot to the Northmen.  Only a single person was allowed at a time to negotiate with Milkyaton, the servant of the wizard that appraised items salvaged from the city.  Shamus accompanied the strange looking foreigner, wearing the traditional head wrap kufiyya and agal of the desert people, and they went deep into the tower to sit on low cushions and speak.  The metal box was carried by a pair of blocky wooden automatons that looked like dwarves with turbans.

In the end, Shamus left the strange tower, with its exotic smells, coffee drinks, and onion-shaped turret on top, with a mere 150sp, but with the knowledge that the wizard would pay well for alien writing (which, to the modern reader, I've been describing a bit like Braille).  Now they had a better idea on their scavenging in the city.

Before the next jaunt back to the city, they were at the Njord Hall looking for help, and met a new potential PC, the Northman, Falki  (we were down some players, so one of the dads brought his kiddo along).  They learned that Galm, the mercenary from last week (who had that thing fly into his head), was out there recruiting his own group, with bold talk of finding the passages into the deeper depths.  They wanted to stay far away from Galm after what they had seen.

Back in the dungeons, they went to see if the bandits from the Angry Yrsa were still camped out in one of the rooms.  Different week, different players.  One Sleep spell later, and the Angry Yrsa was down 7 crew members and the group was counting silver and stacking equipment to take back to town.  "They attacked us first", said Shamus.  "That's my story and I'm sticking to it."  The murder hobo tradition is alive and well.

The Well of Woe area is well-trodden, and there were runic markings in chalk on some of the entranceways and hatches giving some indication of the room beyond… the room with the laser turret was marked as "danger", another room might have been filled with undead with the word "gjenganger", and so on.  (They ended up defeating the laser with mirrors and looting that room, picking over the decapitated corpses of some less savvy explorers).

There was a large hostelry set up in one of the chambers, a small barracks where a man named Agnarson and his crew offered to provide safe quarters and food in return for coin.  "It beats having to pay the toll every day to re-enter the Well of Woe", said Agnarson.  "We charge quite a bit less than the toll and you don't have to leave the dungeon at all."

One of the final moments was when they were backtracking to search some areas they moved through quickly, when a large number of rats, giant rats, came skittering out of the dark.  The rats ended up mobbing Twig-belly, one of the retainers, who went down to the ground screaming while giant rats clung to his torso and bit him in the face.

"Yeah, he's pretty much dead already, let's just throw oil on the whole mess and call it a night".  I'm sure the other retainers will feel that was a good choice, too.

Game three ended with the group hauling all their looted gear back up the Well of Woe and back to camp, meeting the trader to see what was salvageable for coin.  We're using a silver standard, so 300sp is a fine "night at the office" for level 1 adventurers.

Nogal used to post an intermittent blog over at Chronicles of Nogal, but the kid's computer died a few months ago and I haven't had the chance to get a new motherboard.  He said this is what he'd be putting in his character's diary about game night (if this proves interesting, maybe I'll end the DM's game reports with Mustafa's war diaries).

Mustafa's war diary - Day 3
I got chain mail today.  From a dead guy.  Woohoo.  Another henchman bit the dust today, torn apart by giant rats.  Then we put a bunch of oil on him and the rats and we burnt them.  I wouldn't want to be him.

Harrow Home's Dark Pit

Here and there, I'm jotting notes for the future setting of Harrow Home Manor.  It's significantly different than the Black City and is a good outlet for the supernatural and Gothic horror themes that don't quite belong on Thule.  You may recall, it’s a crumbling manse on the Yorkshire moors, a 16th century ruin on a site whose history stretches far into the past.  Factions of malign sorcerers compete in the darkness to control access to the secrets deep below the ruins.

In the deepest extent beneath Harrow Home is a miasmic hole known as "the pit".  The pit is the ultimate prize that drives the competing sorcerers of Harrow Home.  Access to the pit… and the strange thing it contains.

The object in the pit was brought to the moors in a time before history; there are drawings in those deeps from an early people that depict the thing in the pit when it was small, when it could still be carried, along with drawings of extinct animals such as the giant tusked mammoths.  There are renderings of the thing made at other times; a mural from the Roman occupation of the site, an ink drawing on vellum made by a Christian monk that's been stored in the wizard's library.  One cannot escape the conclusion that the thing in the pit is growing, and continues to grow, towards some unfathomable birth.  Now it fills the whole space and stands taller than a man.

Written accounts describe it as a black cyst, a scabrous oval whose crack-riddled surface secretes a repellent liquid discharge, or spews strange gases and ruinous spores.  These unhealthy discharges form an object of study by Harrow Home's arcane practitioners, both living and dead - they strive to create spells to coax this issue forth with greater frequency and receive the dark gifts it bestows.

The meaning behind the thing in the pit alters through the lens of the observer.  To the medieval monks, it was the Adversary itself, the morningstar expelled from the heavens and cast to earth, and they called it The Prisoner.  The Romans considered it a Celtic monster, the Celts thought it the eye of Balor, and earlier peoples worshipped it as a sleeping god.

In the end, the monks might not have been so wrong to imagine it fell to earth from beyond the world; the thing generates a terrible gravity as if it seeks to return to Hell itself and the lower dungeons are continually sinking.  If the records are to be believed, the old fane at the bottom of the pit was once on the surface of the moors, and the distance to the surface becomes greater as the centuries march on.  Thus, there are successive layers of history in the dungeon, and descending into the depths is tantamount to traveling backwards through time.

Notes:
The first of many forays into the background of Harrow Home Manor, getting some early thoughts out on the blog while these ideas swirl around my head.  Most things too supernatural or Gothic quickly get jotted into the notebook for eventual inclusion into Harrow Home.  The cyst in the pit would make an awesome drawing - I'm imagining something like a steaming, cancerous version of Mothra's egg, with an obeisant sorcerer nearby.

Project Updates - the Black City and Harrow Home

The scope for the current version of the Black City is taking shape. Right now it sits as a long series of text files in a directory, along with a mix of map graphics and hand-drawn maps in a plain folder; I pasted about 2/3rds of the text files into a word document a few weeks ago when we started running it at the table, and it was around 100 pages.  I was estimating this first installment to come in around 160 pages; now that I'm abandoning many of the random tables for actual pre-generated content, who knows what that will do to the size (and everything will change when it gets laid out).  Some serious editing should shrink it all down.

The scope is turning out to be fairly expansive - it includes the islands of the Thule archipelago as a hex crawl; 320 detailed hexes for the ruined surface of the city; 15 or so detailed surface areas within the ruins (many of them are multi-level mini dungeons, such as large towers that still stand); the first 2 dungeon levels beneath the city, the Transit Tunnels and Warrens of Decay; Trade Town, a small but detailed home base; tons of NPC's and opposing explorers; an alien bestiary and guide to artifacts in the city.  The dungeons tend to be small and modular; for example, the sprawling subway tunnels of level 1 lead to 6 mini-dungeons (20 rooms or so each) and a handful of junctions and smaller room complexes, making level 1 around 150 rooms, but geographically dispersed.  My notes cover another 5 dungeon levels below 2 (levels 3-8) but I'll save those for a second installment if I ever get this first one out the door.

Play testing is invaluable!  I have a bunch of trips coming up in July, but I really want to get more groups involved.  I may run a neighborhood kids game on Thule to get more of it opened up, and may even join the G+ hangout crowd later in July (assuming I can swing another gaming night while maintaining the whole work-family-writing balance thing).  I'm trying to put  a late event on the schedule for Gencon, to allow a group of strangers into one of the remote sections of the first level.  I'll drop a note here when it's confirmed in case any readers want to get in.  I just remembered though, that I posted it for running Lamentations - wasn't there some bad blood between Gencon and LOTFP?  Let's see if it gets kicked out by the machinery.

Meanwhile - expect to start  seeing posts on Harrow Home Manor trickling out.  I've discovered a thing about my creative cycle; I like to get those inspirational posts out early, lots of blah blah blah, and then let the ideas percolate and marinate for a while.  It's important to write things down and keep a good notebook, and look at old ideas with a fresh set of eyes later.  Inspirational posts for the Black City have been floating around the blog for well over a year before it kicked into high gear a few months ago.  I'm going to start Harrow Home Manor simmering in a similar way, with the expectation that it will be properly seasoned and ready for cooking sometime early next year.  And now all this talk of flavoring food is making me a bit hungry.  I had just gotten back from a hike with the kids when I started writing this one  - I needed to get some lunch!  See you later.

Black City Retainers

No plan survives contact with the enemy... or in this case, no campaign survives contact with the players, at least in its initial form.  I've been busy revising a lot of my campaign tools this week to increase utility for the table top; all those random tables of which I was so proud are getting turned into spreadsheets to generate content in advance for faster use at the table.

I've converted the ship generator, name generator, hex content stocker, and just put together a simple spreadsheet for rolling up NPC retainers.  Here's a snapshot or so of 20 retainers appropriate for a Viking themed game.

On the island of Thule, retainers become available a number of ways.  Some men hire onto larger ships as rowers, sailing to Thule to contract out as mercenaries.  Sometimes there is a falling out with one's own crew.  And lastly, they're survivors of a failed party seeking to catch on with a new group.

Randomly Generated Viking Ships

Big thanks to those insightful comments from yesterday - it really helped cement my decision to pregenerate more content, both for my tabletop game and for the future manuscript.  I like the idea of publishing the source tables in an appendix with some algorithms so a home DM can make their own content, too.

I put the excel programming in place and generated a few hundred sample ships yesterday - below is a table excerpt on how they look.  For me personally, this gives me plenty of bones to improvise the rest; keep in mind that somewhere I have a chart with ship demographics - what's the level of a knarr captain versus a longship captain, what's the crew breakdown of level 0 guys, that kind of stuff (it might be out here, too, I'll look for the link).  I also made a few hundred extra Viking names and personalities in case other names are needed.  Next up - a "meat shields" type generator for Black City retainers, and then I'm going to program the hex content generators.

Click to Embiggen

Random Content and Speed During Play

One of the interesting things I'm learning during these early Black City sessions is the gap between good content generation tools and good content.  A simple example - the group runs into some bandits, what's the name of the bandit leader?  Which ship are they from?

It's Agnar.  "Agnar Thorvaldson, or Agnar of Bergen?  Oh, you meant Agnar the Sallow; good.  Just glad it's not Agnar son of Skjolf.  Old Skjolf already hates us."

The point being, there's a lot of ways to generate a good Viking name on the fly, I've built myself tables upon tables of tools to generate names, places, ship names, personalities, all these super flavorful things with the Viking details.  (Some of them appeared in previous blog posts, like here: Viking names.  There's a section on random tables on the Black City page).

Detail is important for this type of campaign, the setting demands lots and lots of easily referenced details.  When the party gets into a scrum with Agnar Thorvaldson's bandits, it's important to know they have kin on the Angry Yrsa, one of the ships on the island.  The party probably just made a handful of enemies in the other crew; this is the kind of stuff that's going to drive conflict in the campaign.  "You run into another set of Viking bandits"  is lazy and boring; "You run into another group from the Angry Yrsa" adds immediate excitement; the DM knows they'll take a penalty to the reaction roll because a party member killed Agnar the Sallow in a duel and the crew is spoiling for some payback.

Which brings me back to the original thought here - table top speed.  I'm finding more and more that tools are great, but generating content before we sit down and play is even better.  Having some huge lists of pre-generated names, ships, and so forth is proving to be best of all.  Dice rolling the stuff got to be a drag, so now I'm programming it all into excel to generate premade lists (I'm really too lazy to reinstall mssql and do it all through an rdbms right now).

I know the dungeons have been interesting so far, but I'm hoping the group explores the ruined surface when they need a change of pace so I can see how the hex content creation plays.  There's a finite number of hexes and I'm wondering if I should just number and auto-populate the hexes - it would play faster, but is less inspirational.

In a published version of the city, I'd probably include lists of premade content so a DM could sit down and play it 'right out of the box' with a list of premade ships, Viking groups, and so on - but include the raw tables in an appendix for additional creation and inspiration.  What do you guys think?

And the question for fellow game masters - there's excitement generating content on the fly and forcing yourself to improvise, versus having it laid out in advance and not having to pause for a dice rolling sequence.  Where's your sweet spot?

Black City Session 2: Head Games

Cast of Characters
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior
Uther of Alfheim, an elf
Shamus, a Gaelic wizard
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter
Irina Edvards, a fighter

Retainers:
Arthur the Fair (specialist), Bjorn Fjordrunner (fighter), Brick Bunnycracker (halfling)
New:  Visin of Frey, a cleric; Galm - a mercenary; Twig-belly - a mercenary

Time for the group's second foray into the ruins of the Black City.  It was a Sunday night, so we didn't have the full crew.  Plus, the retainer Ulf Skullcrusher failed a loyalty check back at camp, and decided to try his luck with another group.  They headed to Trade Town to try and hire some more retainers.

Trade Town is organized as a series of four long halls in a square, surrounded by a low berm of rock and dirt, forming a central yard.  Two of the halls are reserved for the jarl that built the fort, Bergfinn, and his soldiers, while the other two are used as a trade hall and drinking hall.  The group spent some time at the Njord Hall buying drinks and picking up the gossip.

A bit later, they stumbled out of the Njord Hall with a pair of newly hired, rugged looking mercenaries, Galm and Twig-belly; a fresh-faced priest of Frey, excited to be invited on a foray into the ruins; and a rumor that if you follow some of the tunnels under the city, you'll run into a section of cloudy mist in the tunnels, and that some deranged killers were living in the mist.

Out at the Well of Woe, the guards of the steaming hole confirmed the rumor about the mists.  "Yeah, that's true; a tough group recently tried to pass through the mists, and said they were beaten back by axe wielding mad-men.  It's only a few weeks into the season, but there are probably at least 6 crews down in the tunnels already, and it's not unheard of for a group to turn to banditry if they're not finding stuff.  Keep your eyes open, and watch your backs."

After descent, the group returned to the room with the stone table and conducted another search, tapping the walls carefully, with guards clearly posted.  The bodies of the dead vikings were gone.  Shamus found a small sliding wall panel that he slid open with a dagger, revealing a half foot long quartz crystal wedged between two sockets; the center of the crystal was blackened and smoky.  They pried the crystal out as loot, while the players wondered if it was a fuse.

Down one of the halls they passed a slightly open hatch with a flickering light; from behind the hatch came "We know you're out there, what do you want?" in Norse.  After some 'pleasantries', they learned the guys in the room came over on the knarr, Angry Yrsa, and were planning to attack another group that limped back to a camp from the big tunnel carrying loot, but nursing injuries.  "How about we team up to take those guys out and split whatever loot they found?"  In the room, the two groups gauged the other by lantern light - the party was bringing eleven, the bandits had six members in rough leathers with spears and clubs.

This threw a real monkey wrench at the players - would they play the game as amoral murder hobos, teaming up with bandits to bash in the skulls of fellow explorers, or would they focus on exploration?  There are no strong bonds between crews from distant places.  We're not using alignment as a moral straightjacket, so everyone is basically neutral unless they use magic.  It was a pretty interesting (and lively) discussion, but in the end, they voted 3-2 not to team up with the bandits and attack the other guys - for now, at least, they're focusing on exploration.  "What are you, a bunch of milk-drinking children?", grumbled Thorbrandson, the bandit leader.  "This is easy silver, and you'd rather go face death and monsters?  Go on, get out of here you cowards".  Shamus really wanted to Sleep them after that.

Not far from there, they passed the camp of the injured veterans.  "Keep walking past this hatch, if you know what's good for you", came a hostile threat from beyond the cracked door.  When the group warned the voice about the bandits not far from there, they got small thanks and a tip:  "Be careful when you enter the mists.  We ran into a group of mad-men up there, who attacked with axes from out of the mist.  They have the 'dungeon madness', and can't be treated with".  But the veterans never opened the hatch.

The last interesting thing was after exploring a few rooms and halls, they came to a dead end where a large metal box sat near the wall.  It had a lid, and close inspection saw a bit of waxy seal holding the lid down.  The metal on the box appeared to be lead, which would be worth something back at camp, but the players weren't keen on breaking the seal.  "Hey Galm, this is our most likely source of treasure on this delve, how do you feel about popping the lid open with your knife?"

After flipping open the lid, Galm screamed and fell back, clutching his face.  Twig-belly gasped in horror, "Did you see that?  WTF!" Meanwhile, Galm twitched and whimpered on the ground, his head flopping back and forth.

"It was like a giant bug, it flew right out of the chest and hit Galm in the face, only it flew right *into* his face and then disappeared.  This is totally messed up."  Meanwhile, everyone now saw the thing left in the box - an alien looking skull, large almond-shaped eye sockets, small malign teeth, and a large hole in the middle of the forehead.

Galm sat up and seemed to be feeling better.  "Blacked out there for a minute, but I'm feeling better now.  Feeling better than I've been in a long time", he drawled, and flashed a wicked smirk.  (It's probably nothing).

Time was late, so a couple of guys lugged the heavy box with the skull and they made their way out.  "I don't think we're going to invite Galm along next time" seemed to be the popular opinion.  They ended the night making idle conjecture whether an alien bug would be bursting out of Galm's head at some point, or whether the hole represented 'trepanning' and they should look for a drill back at camp and put a hole in Galm's head.  I was amazed that it was one of the 11 year olds that brought up trepanning and started expounding about its use to relieve cranial swelling and migraines in prior times.  We have some home schooled kids in the neighborhood, and you never know what oddball things they’ve picked up in their readings or watching history shows - that was pretty cool.