A Cleaved Head No Longer Plots

A Cleaved Head No Longer Plots
--Norse wisdom

In which our stalwart looters find a hidden area within the Well of Woe, and escape with a worthy reward.

Sometimes it pays to come on that night when a lot of the regular players can't make it, and the group turns to a bunch of retainers to help fill out the ranks.  Less full-share members to split the XP!

Back at their camp, the group started by inquiring amongst the crew of the Isgerd's Fury if any of the other explorers were good with locks, or sneaking around, or climbing - the Spitsberg Pirates had an immediate opening for a thief.  Ivar the Bow-Bender stepped forward, and was hired on after a short interview.  Apparently Shamus's reputation is growing, evidenced by Ivar's enthusiasm (and high potential morale).

The usual debate happened, regarding which destination should be tonight's goal - the upper ruins, the Well of Woe, or a deeper dungeon, like the mist dungeon?  Tonight they decided to finish exploring the Well of Woe.  I'm skipping all of the other transactional stuff, going to Trade Town to sell gear, rumor mongering, and putting in motion the plan of implementing the gambling ring.  (Yeah, that's a whole other story, their scheme to bring high stakes gambling to Thule).

This was interesting; after paying the toll and heading off into an unexplored section beneath the Well of Woe, the party found this curious inscription in the wall, engraved not by stone chisels, but by some otherworldly hand that melted the lines into the very stone:

To Those Who Come After

The Statement of Publius Labienus Murena

Principales IV, Classis Nemea

Our Ship is Ruined by Ice

Unable to Depart, We Descend to the Forest

To Build a New World

Many Fallen Are Left Behind

Year CCXXXI, in the Reign of Gallus

I should point out, it was engraved in Latin, although a few of the characters could read it; Shamus read it aloud.

Curiosity was piqued!  Could this mean there's a "forest" somewhere deeper in the dungeons, or were the Romans here in an earlier age, when the weather was different?  Someone reminded the other players of the warm, fetid odors coming up from the depths, when they stood before a hole in the floor of the mist dungeon.  Perhaps there really was a stinking jungle down in the dark?  Could descendants of the Romans still be alive, somewhere in the depths?

Over the course of the succeeding chambers, a Norse shrine was discovered, god poles and evidence of blood rituals around the room.  Various camp sites, replete with runic Norse graffiti were discovered, with such memorable slogans as "Halfdanson was here", or "I killed a man… twice", perhaps a reference to the dead frequently coming back to life.  One of the scrawls the group puzzled over was this: "The giant's head is here, it drips.  The body is in the ice!"  Some of the writings were traditional wisdom, like the piece at the top - "A cleaved head no longer plots".  I guess things were simpler in Viking times.  Office politics would be much easier to manage if I carried a battle axe.

The climax of the night was when the group discovered a hidden Roman ossuary, where dozens of skeletal remains lay in repose beneath standards of the golden eagle.  "Even if they're only gold plated, those standards would be worth a lot of money", quipped the thief.  Of course, it was a bit of a trap, and the group found themselves fighting dozens of 'hungry bones' - skeletons that loped on all fours, attacking them viciously with claws and bites, doing anything to pull flesh from the bone.  Anything swallowed by a skeleton fell through the skeleton's ribs, where its neighbors fought over the scraps while waiting their turn to attack the fresh, tasty people.

This was one of those hour-and-a-half, edge-of-your-seat battles, where the group formed a four-man fighting wall in front of the hatch, preserving their escape route if the line should fail, while the clerics did what they could to heal the front line, and fresh fighters could rotate in after a bit of first aid or cure light wounds.

We’re currently using the LOTFP rules for the campaign (though I fully intend to give it a test with ACKS as well), and I have to say, the Turn Undead treatment is high risk/high reward.  If you're not familiar, Turn Undead is a 1st level spell in the LOTFP rules, making for a difficult resource choice for the players.  The transit tunnels of the undercity have been crawling with undead, making me think two Turn Undead spells is necessitated, but the players gravitate towards Cures when they pick spells.  This time they had three clerics, so they took two Cures and a Turn.

In the LOFTP version of Turn Undead, the cleric can keep rolling to turn more undead as long as they succeeded on the previous roll; Bottvild the Valkyrie Priestess got on a hot streak, and ended up driving half of the skeletons back with her Asgardian chants.  I was impressed.  Judicious rotation in and out of the front line kept everyone alive, and the group ended up destroying over 15 of the skeletons without losing anyone.  The priestess kept the remaining undead cowed at the far end of the room, as a few of the characters stole forth to grab the golden Roman legionary (aquila) standards and beat a hasty retreat.  They closed the hatch behind them and headed for home with a worthy haul of loot.  We have a couple of characters that have hit 1,400xp and have their eyes fixed on reaching level 2, assuming they can survive a couple more games.

Just for the record books - here was this week's crew of player characters and retainers:

Cast of Characters
Mustafa of Arabia, a Fighter
Shamus, a Gaelic wizard
Brutok the Dwarf
Bottvild, a Cleric

Retainers
Bjorn Fjordrunner, Ayerick, and Fafnir - fighting men; Borghild and Halam, clerics; Ivar the Bow-Bender, a thief

The Relative Importance of Plate Mail

BX D&D has a curious relationship with plate armor.

At 60gp a suit, there's a really good chance most 1st level fighters will be able to afford plate, assuming they made a good roll on their starting money.  Additionally, plate seemed to be the default fighter armor for NPCs in those early games , too.  We'd kick off most campaigns with the Keep on the Borderlands, where just about every rank-and-file soldier in the keep is dressed in plate.  It seems far too ubiquitous and democratic to be the cap-a-pie of the noble born medieval knight on a destrier.  Later in the BECMI D&D line, "field plate" was added as a new armor type to represent armor reserved for the wealthy nobility.  Nowadays, most of the retro clones and later games have upped the price on plate, making those 1st level fighters wait until they've survived an adventure or two before they upgrade to it.

However, I wonder how much of the assumed survivability for low level fighting types was contingent on AC 3 or AC 2 (or better) right from the first excursion?

It becomes an interesting question in light of the last post, where it was suggested the high middle ages of Europe might not be the best analog for the ideal adventuring society.  When you shift the milieu to the Spanish Main or the Roman frontier or some early modern period, medieval plate mail no longer makes sense as an armor choice in the wider world.

I find myself evaluating two contrary positions.  The rules approach assumes armor classes are absolute, and the medieval knight in full plate represents the armored pinnacle of personal protection.  The unarmored musketeers of the 17th century are easy to hit, in game terms, and the legionaries in their lorica segmentata or lorica hamata would be ill-protected against a medieval knight as well.  Most characters in a colonial-era game would be AC 9 in BX D&D terms!

Alternatively, you can assume the game assumes the premiere fighter of the time period should be difficult to hit, and come up with an alternate scale to allow fighters to achieve better AC regardless of the military technology of the period.  Perhaps the fighter in the 17th century increases their base AC like a monk to represent the ability to duel or fire and maneuver with better skill?  The heavily armored roman legionary in segmented lorica would be armor class 2 or 3, the pinnacle of the armored warrior of his time?

I fall into the first camp, where armor classes are absolute, and one of the side effects of shifting out of the Medieval paradigm and dropping plate mail as a choice, is that front line fighters will be less protected.  In a game with muskets and firearms, cover and concealment and personal dexterity increase in importance, and that seems like the logical progression.

An Elf, a Dwarf and a Cleric Meet in the Tavern

There's a spate of D&D posts in our space acknowledging that the apparent medieval assumptions underlying D&D aren't a great fit for the kind of society that produces free-wheeling adventurers; nor does it support an environment that allows the kind of autonomy and accumulation of wealth you see in our D&D stories.

It’s important to emphasize the context here is sandbox D&D; a style where a group of adventurers is free to gather rumors and information, plan their own exploits, and then go off and do them.  They're not lackeys of Lord So-and-So or retainers on missions from Baron Blah-Blah-Blah getting story awards for fulfilling heroic quests given by a patron; they're part of the middle class and they're interested in using their liberty to travel around and find loot.  I called these factors out as autonomy and frontiers some recent time ago when I was trying to create a list for myself that articulated what elements needed to be addressed, for a game to adhere to D&D's tropes.

The other caveat for the discussion here is historical inspirations; it appertains to D&D settings that model the structures and elements of a real-world period.  Thus we end up talking about things like adapting D&D to the early modern period, the Thirty Years, the Spanish Main, colonization of the New World, and so on.  My own campaign is currently in the Viking Age.

It’s fun to jeer about the cliché campaign starting off with an elf, a dwarf, and a cleric meeting in a tavern, but it's actually a pretty good litmus test for whether the milieu would support a good sandbox game; Frankish manorial estates in the early Dark Ages didn't have taverns and inns and well-established market economies, so there wouldn't be a place for an elf, a dwarf, and a cleric to meet up and plan an excursion in the first place.  It fails the tavern test.  Heck, I'll probably start using the 'tavern test' to evaluate the agency inherent in potential settings - if there's no place to get a drink and hire someone, without permission from the local authority, it's probably not ideal for a free-roaming sandbox.

Since the beginning of the blog here, the time periods I've discussed most often on my "setting wish list" all feature adventurers with great personal autonomy, markets and market towns, and open frontiers.  I just wasn't conscious of articulating the key attributes why they seemed like a good fit for sandbox games.

• Pax Romana
• The Viking Age
• Age of Exploration
• The Thirty Years War
• Golden Age of Piracy
• Colonial America

Noisms elaborated the discussion of autonomy and frontiers a bit further in this post, historical context of D&D, bringing in societal elements like unemployment or lack of opportunity at home, technological improvements that open new frontiers, and a high ratio of perceived reward relative to the risk.  New eras are suggested for adventures, ones I hadn't considered, like the colonization and discoveries of Africa or Asia by Europeans during the Victorian age.  Check it out, it's a good read.

If you're making your own sandbox fantasy campaign in a home brew world, you've probably assumed some kind of freeman class, markets and market towns, and frontiers, without a second thought to whether it aligned with any historical period.  Living in the first world, it's second nature to assume the setting will allow great personal liberty to the characters.  Of course the elf, dwarf and cleric, or a pair of halflings, will have a place to buy some ales and plan their adventures - and the ale definitely comes in pints.

Gaming BBQ Pics

Still taking it easy on the blog after a travel and training week for the job - here are some pics from our gaming BBQ last week.  For folks that follow our weekly game reports, you can put some faces with the regular characters.  Missing from the pictures was Brutok the Dwarf; he made the bbq but it must have been after we grabbed some quick pictures on an ipad.  Regular posts to resume again next week.

Pirates and Ninjas and Osprey Books

I recently discovered these Osprey Publishing books when I was looking for reference information on Viking military structures for the Black City game; after I picked up a couple of the smaller books, I learned that Osprey has collected some of them into hardcovers, so I've been looking for those on ebay here and there.  Scourge of the Seas collects their books on pirates, privateers, buccaneers, and pirate ships; Warriors of Medieval Japan collects the sub books samurai, ninja, ashigura, and warrior monks (sohei) into one volume.

Anyone else a big fan of Osprey books for historical military reference?  Which ones have you read?

One element that's worked really well in the Black City campaign so far is the idea of lots of hostile groups of men forming a big part of the threat as the players explore the alien ruins.  It's given me lots of ideas on how similar approaches could work in the context of a pirate D&D campaign, or showdowns between rival samurai groups in an Asian-themed game.  To my mind, I don't know that I've ever seen a large published dungeon for an Asian-themed D&D campaign - the wheels are turning.  The Isle of Dread would be an excellent backbone for a pirate-themed campaign; the island is part of an archipelago, and the DM could expand the campaign to cover the whole island chain.

Anyway, it continues to be a light posting week, while I cook my brain in a data warehousing class and try to catch up with my regular job in the evenings.  Let me know if you have any Osprey recommendations - I'll probably be tracking down some of the books on the Roman military, next.

Skeletal Legionaries

Lazy post today -  here's another moment from Saturday's Black city game captured on Felt's sketchpad.  I don't recount all of the details when posting a game recap, especially not all of the wandering monsters.  At one point, the group found themselves trapped in a dead-end hall by a "patrol" of skeletal legionaries wearing antique Roman armor.

Here's a picture of one of the characters, Bjorn, charging in against the skeletons with a spear.  (He quickly switched weapons when he saw the spear was doing minimal damage).

Thanks for the great sketch, Felt!

Black City Game 5 - The Geekfest

Howell dishes punishment to a pair of frost gremlins

We had everyone available for this weekend's game, including a VIP guest (Felt).  It became a combo game-day / BBQ that ended up with the name "Geekfest" - I have a few pics to put up when I get the chance.

Our adventurers are spoiled for choice, and the first chunk of the game involved weighing the pros and cons of exploring different mini-dungeons they've discovered.  (So far, they’re not too interested in wandering the sprawling topside ruins, despite some job offers).  They had partially explored the Well of Woe, discovered some rooms near the first junction, and just cleared the 'killers in the mist', opening a new dungeon.  The majority wanted to press on into the mists, figuring that it was "new ground", so that was the decision.

Other crew members of the Isgerd's Fury were invited to join; the new characters were Howell the Halfling, and the valkyrie sisters Bottvild and  Borghild (both clerics).  They set off the next morning.  Here was this week's crew:

CAST OF CHARACTERS
Mustafa of Arabia, a Fighter
Arthur the Fair, a Thief
Shamus  Bloodstar, a Gaelic wizard
Brutok the Dwarf
Agnar, a Fighter
Molnar, a Cleric
Bottvild, a Cleric
Howell, a Halfling

Retainers:
Bjorn Fjordrunner, Fafnir - fighting men; Borghild, a cleric; Skoldig, a thief

Here's one good reason why you'd want to find alternate entrances to the undercity; the walk from the Well of Woe entrance to the misty dungeon takes about four hours through the subway tunnels!  Unless they start sleeping in the dungeon or camping in the city ruins, exploration time is becoming curtailed.  Plus, there's the ever-present risk of running into hostile explorers.

This time out, they were ambushed by some nasty veterans hiding in the dark, men wearing black cloaks and raven feathers.  They waited in the stretch of tunnel between the chasm and the first junction, watching the party approach with lanterns.  The Ravencloaks had the jump on the party, and the leader almost planted his axe into the surprised Mustafa before calling a halt to the attack.  "I know these men!"

The Ravencloak leader, Hamdir Hildigrimson, had spent some time with the Varangians near Byzantium, and had fought in some conflict with Mustafa in the desert lands.  The encounter quickly turned from a near fight to a chance to break out some mead, share a drink, recount recent exploits, and wish each other good hunting.  (DM's note:  Behind the scenes,  any time there are extreme reaction rolls, good or ill, I have a quick check to randomly determine the kind of "unfinished business" between the characters and the other party.  In this case, they turned out to share a few people who were old war buddies).

When the group made it to the mist tunnels later, Brick was out front scouting, and he heard a light scrabbling sound in the mist.  Something emerged out of the tunnel ahead of him, a reptilian gremlin creature with a small cage in one hand, and dangling a rat by its tail in the other hand.  It smacked him upside the head with the cage during the surprise round (doing minimal damage) and then uttered a ghastly shriek, which was answered by a handful of additional shrieks just ahead.  Here they come!

The group formed a 4-man front in the wide tunnel and met the charging frost gremlins; they're not much tougher than goblins, so it wasn't a long fight.  Here's a nifty pic of Howell the halfling giving a gremlin the business side of his short sword; never underestimate the coolness of having a sketch artist sitting in on your game session (thanks Felt!)

After the fight, they found a few more rat cages (with rats in them) and then they entered the misty dungeon itself.

This was a longer game session, with a lot of exploration that I'm not going to cover in great detail - don't want to put you to sleep!  There were secret doors, water conduits beneath the floor, fuse crystals in wall sockets, and similar elements that stretched the bounds of fantasy.  In one set of rooms, they found a web-choked access tube with a ladder going down.  Dank, hot air wafted up the tunnel - their first discovery of a way to a deeper level.  One large room was so obscured by mist, they needed to walk across it carefully to find its furthest extents.

It was in this large chamber that two party members almost met their deaths.  Thick fog obscured vision, and the characters weren't particularly careful walking across the room - a yawning 20' wide chasm was the source of the fog, as hot air from below met colder air from above, and two characters tripped on the edge.  They both made saving throws the allowed them to either cling to the edge or grab the dangling clamshell doors that hung down into the chasm, and the others were able to pull them up.  No one knew how far down went the lightless abyss, but like the access tunnel they had discovered, the air was hot, damp, and fecund.

The torso of a large metal humanoid was found in the expansive room, and the players theorized it was a piece to an automaton (robot, golem?).  They're considering bringing it back for salvage, but ultimately left it behind for two reasons - it would be difficult to carry, and they're wondering if there are other parts lying around?

Exploring some nearby rooms brought them into contact with another group of deranged berserkers torturing a couple of men hanging upside down by their feet.  The berserkers tried to convince the group that the prisoners were the ones with "dungeon madness" and possessed by demons of madness, but they ended up "sleeping" the berserkers anyway with a spell.  I guess the players have seen that movie and know how it ends (with battle cries and axes and never failing morale and death of PC's).  They freed and healed the bandits, found more of their compatriots hiding nearby, and forced all of them to swear oaths of loyalty, at sword point, to the Isgerd's Fury.  The group decided they need to keep replacing crew back at camp, so they have enough sailors to make it home at the end of the summer.

We ended with a mystery.  They encountered the first "powered door" that still functioned.  The hulking fighters were unsuccessful with crowbars to pry open the hatch - it kept closing automatically with a whir and whoosh.  A dull red light flashed intermittently beside the door on one of the stones.  Red, red, red, what could it mean?  Apparently that was too much for brains fried after 7-8 hours of outdoor gaming and BBQ, and it was time to pack it in and head topside.  They began the long march back to the Well of Woe.