Making Karameikos Great Again

I started a second game a month or so back with one of my older gaming groups running Shadowdark.  We had all ended up at the same end-of-summer barbeque, started talking about games, and realized several folks in the old guard wanted to give Shadowdark a try.  I had recently become enamored of the rules as well, and so the idea for a new campaign was formed.  This is basically our first game report.

Shadowdark reminds me a lot of Moldvay BX.  Maybe because it's like what a BX version of 5E should have been?  The game embraces simple classes, simple action resolution, and dungeon crawling.  The Shadowdark community claims you can run classic BX style modules with the system mostly as is, only adjusting the treasure down a factor.  I was drawn to the idea of seeing how it handled classic modules from the 1980's that we haven't run before.  Thus germinated the idea of running B5 Horror on the Hill in my favorite setting from that era, the Grand Duchy of Karameikos*.

One other thing we talked about was running a "gauntlet".  Shadowdark borrows some ideas from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), including starting with a pile of 0-level characters, putting them through a horrendous situation, and the survivors get to pick classes as level 1 characters.  In DCC it's called a funnel, in Shadowdark it's a gauntlet, but the concepts are similar.  One difference seems to be in DCC, each player will run all 4 of their zero-level characters at once, so a 5-person table will have 20 peasants trying to survive the funnel.  There aren't a lot of published Shadowdark gauntlets, but the mind-set seems to be each player runs a single character at a time, and the back-up zero level guys are off-camera in reserve (depending on the fiction of the gauntlet).

I decided to use the gauntlet as the lead-in to Horror on the Hill and make it part of the same nexus of events.  In B5 Horror on the Hill, a remote outpost (Guido's Fort) sits on the near side of the River Shrill; across the river sits an ominous fog-shrouded hill with the rising threat of the goblin king in the dungeons below.  I took a gauntlet called Cry of the Stingbat and hacked it up.  In my version, goblins are sneaking across the river at night to kidnap traders and homesteaders and throw them down a huge hole to feed a colony of "stingbats" (stirges) which assail the inhabitants of the fort at night.  The players start as a group of such victims, needing to escape a fairly linear dungeon before dawn when the flocks of stingbats return home and kill them.  They also found and killed a few goblins hiding out near the entrance; the goblins were carrying foul-smelling smudge sticks and stink bombs that immobilize the stingbats and let them manage the horde.

I can see the appeal of running a zero-level gauntlet.  Characters die left and right, which allows for some gallows humor, and story quickly emerges around the exploits of the plucky survivors.  We ran a strict time clock on the gauntlet night, and the added pressure kept things moving briskly.  Finally, there's a useful community generator at shadowdarklings.net that quickly makes a page of zero-level characters fully equipped for game night.  It's all very convenient.  My players had doubts, but now they're believers - I'm sure we'll do a gauntlet every chance we can when starting a Shadowdark campaign.

Ultimately, the zero-level traders, soldiers, and homesteaders returned to Fort Guido after their ordeal in the stingbat hole; they let the fort commander know about the stingbat horde and turned over the stink bombs and smudge sticks so the garrison could take care of the monsters in the daylight.  Having tasted dungeon adventuring, the group promised to reform back at the Fort as level 1 adventurers and take the fight over the river to the goblins - and hopefully get rich and powerful along the way.  Game 2 involved poking around the Fort, collecting rumors from the tavern and talking to the local "old timer", and finally hiring a boatman to ferry them across the river.  They agreed the boatman would return in two-days time at the agreed upon spot for a pick-up, so the players are carrying just enough food and water.  We honestly didn't get too far in their exploration of the hill after game 2.

I have a range of opinions on Shadowdark - I want to give it a few more game sessions (and maybe even try it with the other gamer group) before rendering official judgment.  It's definitely a vibes game that is laser focused on evoking an old school dungeon crawling vibe, while embracing a lot of modern mechanics from 5E and DCC.  I've had great fun; I don't know if it will displace BX (or even needs to).  I also signed up to run a few convention games as Shadowdark in a couple of months to get more drive time with the rules.  More to come on that front.

I still need to build a map for Guido's Fort, it's not provided in B5.  However, I did put together a new map for Karameikos.  This will sound a bit sacrilegious to fellow Mystarans (?), Mystara-philes(?), but the old 8-mile-per-hex style of the Trail Guides was leaving me a bit cold so I made a custom map (above).  Halloween is coming up, and Karameikos is described as a misty, wild land with dark forests, haunted moors, and foreboding mountains, like something out of Eastern Europe.  Maybe I could put the hidden valley of Barovia in the Black Peaks or Cruth Mountains in time for a Halloween one-shot?  It seems like it could work.

* Apologies for the lame title, when your country's politics are as ridiculous as ours, you've got to find a way to laugh about it.

The Pillories in Death Frost Doom - The Crypt isn't Empty

Our cast of characters continues to explore Death Frost Doom (DFD), but the ending of last game session was perhaps one of my favorites.  First - about Death Frost Doom.  In the early OSR period (pre-2010), this stood out to me as an adventure that took D&D style gaming in a new direction.  Once I started running a game with my old high school friends, I knew this was an adventure that we'd work into the campaign, especially because they like the horror genre. In DFD, the players explore an ominous dungeon full of catacombs and the creepy trappings of a long defunct death cult.  The tension builds as they continue to loot crypts but aren't finding any monsters - but they know something bad is going to happen at some point, they just don't know how and when.  Last game ended with the first bad thing.

The players were in a kitchen in an area of the dungeon dedicated to priest quarters.  They found a hidden air duct in the ceiling that led to a 3' square crawl-space.  The party's halfling, Remi, asked for a boost - he felt some cold air coming down the shaft and wanted to see where it went.  He lit a candle and crawled through the duct, discovering a long vertical shaft that seemed to go up and out - cold air was coming down the shaft from the surface.  But the duct kept going forward, so he kept going.  The other characters called for him to come back, but Remi said he'd be fine.  In the dim light of his candle, he could see the duct opened into the ceiling of another chamber, and it looked like some kind of crypt was down below.

He yelled back at everyone to hang tight while he dropped down to check out the room.  (Mind you, he had no rope or similar gear - once he dropped himself down into the next room, he had no way to get back into the duct).  "It'll be fine", he said, "I'll find my way back one way or another".

The lid of the stone crypt was carved with a relief of a gruesome tyrant standing on the skulls of victims; he passed by the sarcophagus to see if there was a way out of the room before looking into it any further.  Yes!  There was a door out.  Unfortunately, it was barred from the outside.  Why would someone put a bar on the outside of a crypt, as if to keep something in?  That's when he heard the grinding of stone behind him, as something with a grip of iron slid aside the lid of the sarcophagus from the inside and sat upright.  That was the cliffhanger ending of the game night, with the mummified remains of the cult's "grand inquisitor" jerkily lurching towards the trapped halfling and his little candle.  The mummified inquisitor began to interrogate him with a sepulchral voice from beyond the grave, while the other players watched on in horror.

It turns out Remi has been carrying a potion of gaseous form with him since very early in the campaign, so he's confident he'll escape the crypt of the undead horror if he wins initiative, and that's why he was so nonchalant about the risks.  The tension at the table eased a little in anticipation of next game.  But the players are now boggled with the idea that the sprawling dungeon is not entirely quiescent, and there are dark horrors waiting for them, lurking in undiscovered tombs.

By way of reminder, here is our cast of characters, The Pillories:

• Reverend Blackburn - L4 cleric
• Remi Knotwise - L4 halfling
• Allister - L3 magic-user
• Yuri - L3 elf
• Henchmen - Wood (fighter), Toby (specialist), Geoff (fighter)

Other events since last game report included discovery of endless catacombs, filled with thousands of mummified cult members - warriors, priests, commoners, and even children.  There have been traps and curses, including the cleric, who fell victim to a spell that saw him inscribing a tattoo of the death cult on his own forearm while caught in a mindless frenzy; he learned to his horror that he can longer receive the benefits of his own healing magic.  They also discovered the source of the ominous susurrus sound that permeates the dungeon, but quickly retreated when an ooze-like monster crawled out of a well to defend the spikey plant growth that was producing the sound.  They know they'll need to defeat the ooze monster and hack through the spike growth to reach their goal, but decided to double back and finish exploring some other areas and confirm there wasn't another way around it first.  This is how Remi ended up crawling through an air duct to the tomb of the inquisitor.

I had great fun running it, and I'm looking forward to the next installment.

Understanding Shadowdark Treasure XP and Gold

I've continued to spend time with the Shadowdark rules and we're going to try this out in a few weeks after we've wrapped our current LOTFP game.  Character creation and advancement, adventuring, combat, monsters, there are many things in Shadowdark that look like they will play great at the table.  Shadowdark reminds me a lot of what I first loved when discovering the original Moldvay basic book back in the 1980s, and I see a similar sentiment again and again.  Characters like Morgan, Silverleaf, and poor Black Dougal, would seem to be right at home in this game.  One thing that tripped me up on the first read was the treasure system.

Shadowdark is a game that gives XP for treasure, but it's abstract, it's not 1gp = 1xp.  A "normal" treasure horde is worth 1 XP, and a first level character needs 10XP to reach level 2 - so they need to find 10 normal treasure hordes.  Above a "normal" horde, there are "extraordinary" treasure finds that are worth 3 XP, and a "legendary" horde would be worth 10 XP.  For levels 1-3, there's a suggestion that a normal horde should be worth at least 20gp (minimum - it could be more).  An extraordinary horde might include a permanent magic item, and a legendary horde would involve the campaign's unique items and quest items - unlikely at 1st level.  This approach to treasure and XP looks simple to use in practice.  If our 1st level party finds 200gp in a chest, it's 1 XP; if they find 30gp in a bag, it's also 1 XP - simple.

There are a few wrinkles to this approach.  First, everyone in the party gets that 1 XP when finding a treasure horde - it's not tallied and divided at the end of the adventure.  In an old school game like Moldvay/Cook BX, if 5 players found a meager 20gp cache, they'd divide it by 5 at the end of the adventure, they'd each pocket 4gp, and get 4xp (for a fighter, that's 4xp towards their 2,000 xp requirement for reaching level 2 - .2% of the way there!).  For the 5 Shadowdark PC's, they each net 4gp at the end of the adventure as well, but since the find was a normal treasure horde for them, they each received 1 XP upon finding the cache, wich represents 10% of what they need for advancement.  That's a big difference in outcomes, no?

I went ahead and built a "by-the-book" table to figure out how much gold a typical Shadowdark adventuring party would collect over their career, and I'll put it here:

Over the course of 10 levels, the Shadowdark party should collect at least 36,000gp if you only followed the book minimums, but it could be more.  Furthermore, players could cash in things like mundane equipment they found in the dungeon which would count as money but not necessarily experience in game terms.  For comparison, a 10th level 5E party (using by the book treasure hordes) would have collected 80-90,000 gp over their career, so I imagine a Shadowdark group would have a similar haul.  Our Moldvay/Cook BX adventurers would have collected a million gold pieces by level 10.  These figures also provide a simple conversion guide for a BX type adventure - since Shadowdark adventures gain about 1/10th the treasure of a BX character, you can convert BX adventures by scaling down those 800gp treasures to 80gp for Shadowdark.

One of the rationales for the scaled down gold may be there's not much to spend money on in the core rules.  The equipment list is sparse.  There are no spellbooks, no spell research, no gold needed for magic item creation.  You're not saving up for a castle or stronghold.  There are no retainer or hireling rules, and there are several good reasons why Shadowdark (much like 5E) eschews followers and breaks from old school conventions - see below*.  The core rules are also not prescriptive about levying upkeep or living expenses.

The best armor for a fighter, plate mail, is probably not affordable until 3rd or 4th level.  Mithril armor is a better option that's probably achievable in the mid-levels.  Although silver weapons are alluded to in the monster descriptions, I couldn't find any rules on the costs for silver weapons.  There aren't many obligations the players will have to spend money on; priests may have to pay penance (for recovering spells), and everyone else will have torches and consumable equipment to replace.  The big swing factor in the rules is "carousing", which lets players convert extra cash into experience.  In fact, the one watch out to making your world's hordes far richer than the default guidelines would be the unintended consequence it could have on carousing; if you juiced the wealth guidelines, carousing XP could get out of hand.  I haven't analyzed the carousing rules in detail yet, but my sense is there might be diminishing returns as a group levels.

I've called Shadowdark a "beer and pretzels" dungeon crawler and these observations on the Shadowdark economy reinforce that view.  It's not trying to be a simulation.  The lower amount of gold, coupled with the carousing rules, ensures player characters will be frequently broke and willing to get back into the dungeon.  Shadowdark hasn't embraced an end-game that involves domains, castles, or strongholds just yet, so the lower wealth isn't an issue.  On the other hand, the referee doesn't have to deal with the ridiculous situations in older games where player characters have hundreds of thousands of gold pieces sitting around back in town by the mid-levels, and referees invent taxes, training costs, and other penalties to try and drain the coffers.

These are just observations, not judgments.  I'm really looking forward to seeing this game in action, and now two of my gaming groups have both expressed an interest, so I'm sure we'll be firing it up in the near future.  I think we're going to see Shadowdark continue to peel off 5E players and make inroads into the OSR crowd as well as the word continues to get out - it's quite good.  More to come.

* Reasons Shadowdark eschews retainers:  the encumbrance and light system is about forcing tough choices on the players for equipment, torches, and treasure, and extra "mules" in the form of retainers relaxes the resource pressure.  Likewise, the 'action economy' of Shadowdark is meant to be 1 action per player per turn, so things move quickly around the table.  Extra non-player characters on the player's side would slow the game the same as if the players were juggling multiple attacks and bonus actions and action surges and similar 5E-isms.  Finally, the XP rules discussed here, where XP is immediately granted for finding a treasure horde, would also need an adjustment if retainers were put in the mix - perhaps they get half XP like in older editions.

Reading the Shadowdark Rules

I've studied the Shadowdark rules.  I love them.  We're certainly going to run a dungeon crawl using Shadowdark once the York 1630 campaign reaches a good resting spot.  After that, who knows?  One player is clamoring for a Call of Cthulhu campaign;  this group has never experienced the glory that is Dwimmermount; I also want to take a look at the recent Lamentations campaign, A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum 1633, because it sounds interesting and I love the historical setting.  But first, let's talk about Shadowdark RPG.

As an OSR game (or OSR adjacent), it uses 3d6 (in order) to generate statistics - the way Crom intended.  There are only 4 core classes, and the term race has been replaced by the term ancestry, which sounds so much better than "species".  ("Species" is what that outfit in Seattle was adopting, last I checked).  The game has a lower power curve than traditional BX, covering levels 1-10 and squishing nine levels of spells into 5 "tiers".  Hit points and damage are lower, and so is spell damage, and there is no longer a Raise Dead type effect, so death is going to stick.  No player characters have any dark vision, whatsoever - darkness matters.  There's a simple encumbrance tracking system, and resource management (especially light and torches)matters.  There's no skill system, and the DM is encouraged to rely heavily on player skill and only use ability checks for situations where failure is important.  Ability checks have also replaceded saving throws.  Combat has been streamlined to move quickly, including eschewing detailed ranges for "zones" like close, near, and far, encouraging theater of the mind play and getting away from having to measure everything on a grid with a ruler and counting squares.  It's like the author played one-too-many 3-hour-long 5E combat calculating 5' steps and opportunity attacks and declared "Nevermore".

Some other old school things I really liked is putting reaction rolls and morale back into the game (well, obviously they never left our OSR games, but they were minimized in the fifth).  The game uses XP for treasure, going so far as to completely eliminate XP for combat, but added a carousing rule to spend money for XP.  The rule book include several hundred compact monsters, and tons of random tables, covering everything from creating random player characters, to random monsters, encounter tables, NPC parties, spell mishaps, and tons of useful names and tidbits.  I see all you table-enthusiasts.

There are some distinct novelties here that either borrow from modern designs or represent the author's idiosyncratic musings.  For example, character advancement is random.  There's no progression table specifying all 3rd level fighters get X and all 3rd level wizards get Y, for instance.  You roll on a table instead.  Again, it's as if the author played one too many 5E sessions that was all about character optimization instead of emergent play in the dungeon, and finally said, "I've got your CharOps right here, you sub-class junkies... from now on everybody's advancement is random!"  I kind of love it.  I mentioned how spell levels are collapsed into tiers but didn't mention the biggest change - no Vancian magic or spell memorization.  Wizards and Priests roll to cast, and get to keep reusing their spells throughout the day until they hit a spell failure - you could have Cure Wounds for days or lose your healing on the first failed roll.  There are 1's and 20's for catastrophic failures and successes, too.  Shadowdark also suggests the use of a gauntlet for zero-level characters, another nod toward Dungeon Crawl Classics.  I'm interested in seeing how this works out in play - my sense is it will make low level Wizards and Priests a lot more interesting, while also keeping magic unreliable and less formulaic and predictable than the OG style.  Let's go, Lady Luck.

Perhaps one of the more controversial rules I've seen is the "torch timer".  I don't mean using the old BX procedure of tracking turns, where a torch lasts 6 turns, and every 6 turns the players just have to mark off another torch used.  In rules-as-written, Shadowdark expects the DM to start an actual clock and declare the torch is out after an hour of game play.  It sounds a little weird, but as they say, "hear me out".  Your players could cover a lot more than 6 turns with a single torch during exploration mode, so on the one hand this could let them stretch their light source; on the other hand, if the 1 hour mark comes up during combat rounds, it means the torch goes out right in the middle of a fight, putting the characters into pitch black, and the darkness rules in this game are unforgiving.  It's an interesting stressor.  I need to think about that one further and make sure I've grokked all the in's and out's.

The core mechanics will be very comfortable to 5E players - the ability score modifiers are similar to 5E, as is the concept of difficulty class and ability checks and ascending rolls.  Rolling with advantage and disadvantage is here, and that makes a lot of sense as a modern invention, and so is the concept of a luck point (similar to 5E's inspiration, although I think Shadowdark's "luck" might be a little stronger expression of the idea).

The author of Shadowdark is Kelsey Dionne.  I came into contact with her work through 5E, she was an independent designer who was doing horror-themed 5E adventures.  Some of them were homages to Edgar Allan Poe, which I quite enjoyed.  I've seen a few of her interviews on the YouTube and she talks about her influences - she grew up in the Lake Geneva area/southern Wisconsin playing Judges Guild and old school styles, played modern D&D and became a game designer, but never lost that itch for OSR-style exploration gaming, and voila - Shadowdark.  From everything I can tell, Shadowdark looks like a smashing success as a system - not revolutionary, but a smartly designed game that distills and synthesizes a number of influences to make a game that looks fun, plays fast, and delivers a classic adventure gaming experience, in a book that offers modern layout and design, succinct but evocative writing, and a compact one-book volume that hearkens back to the rules cyclopedia.  Seriously, how may games these days have a single "all-in-one" book for the entire game system?  

So yes, I'm super excited to take these rules out for a spin sometime in the next few weeks, then circle back with post-play observations.  But here's a question I've been pondering - there are a lot of OSR rules sets out there, so how and why would Shadowdark earn it's place on my game shelf?  I've got Lamentations of the Flame Princess, of course, because I like horror gaming and no one does the "weird twist adventure" better than that publisher.  Then there is Adventurer Conqueror King - ACKS - a game that takes the promise of BECMI, with domain play and economics, and dials it into Accountants and Aboleths.  I truly love ACKS, but my groups usually don't want to be building spreadsheets in between game sessions. Sigh,  It's tragic, I know.  I've mostly skipped playing OSE, Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, etc - I own most of those original games, and still have all the BX and BECMI and 1E AD&D books on the game shelves, so I don't need the clones.  I look for innovations in new rules sets.  Shadowdark looks like it perfectly fits the niche of a BX style game, a beer and pretzels dungeon crawler, with lessons learned and innovations from modern fantasy games and design.  I think it will bring quality of life improvements to my OSR friends and may lure back some of the 5E players with the familiar mechanics.

There's a free version of the game available that would likely support levels 1-3, and there's an introductory adventure as well:  Shadowdark Preview.  Check it out.

Shadowdark: The Kids Will Be Alright

The large American gaming convention (Gencon) just wrapped, including the annual Ennie Awards.  The game Shadowdark cleaned up a bunch of awards - best product of the year, best game, best rules, and best layout and design.  They ran a million dollar kickstarter last year, and now this thing has become a movement.  They achieved that critical escape velocity that let them leave the fantasy heartbreaker planet and reach the stars.

I haven't played it yet.  When our current LOTFP campaign wraps, I think we'll do a one-shot to see what all the hype is about - there's a free adventure in the free start rules called "Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur" that gives off a Cretan vibe and would fit the bill as an intro adventure.  Shadowdark looks like a rules light or minimalist OSR type game, with a heavy focus on exploration, dungeon crawling, resource management (torches and encumbrance), and XP for treasure, with a few modern design features (like advantage or luck points) while restoring some of the danger and mortality that 5E has eschewed.  The art and aesthetic gives off a Russ Nicholson Fiend Folio vibe - black, white, and a little grotty.

I don't know much about the fandom (yet), but it looks like they have a burgeoning 3rd party marketplace for the game, a reddit sub, Discord, and Facebook presence, and a positive helpful community.  I'm familiar with the author's earlier work (Kelsey Dionne) as I had picked up some of her 5E adventures well before the OGL-apocalypse, back when she was dabbling in 5E adventures with an Edgar Allan Poe influence.  I like how Shadowdark has completely broken from the OGL and is using a creative commons license to enable the 3rd party community.

Shadowdark feels like a bridge between the 5E and the OSR.  It's carrying forward some of the things we loved about 1st edition or BX, the dungeon-crawling and exploration, the class-based characters, the focus on resource management and treasure, and ported them into a game easily recognizable to 5E players. Even a cursory peek into some of Kelsey Dionne's interviews reveals someone deeply familiar with the roots of the hobby and wanting to perpetuate old school, exploration based play.  She said her first roleplaying experience was with The City State of the Invincible Overlord; how many readers of the blog today even remember 19070's Judges Guild, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, or The City State of the Invincible Overlord?  Those names take me back.  Anyway it's really heartening to see younger designers bringing forward exploration-based OSR stylings and then mopping the floor at Gencon.  (The memes have been rich).

I'm looking forward to checking out the game, a little of change of pace in between our edgelord LOTFP games.  Maybe Shadowdark will even stick.  If you've played it, let me know what you thought about it - thanks!  I'll post more once we get some time behind the wheel.

Death Frost Doom and The Pillories - Part 1

 I like this adventure quite a lot - Death Frost Doom.  It showed how an adventure module could be game-breaking, campaign-breaking, in a way that wasn't really done before.  Sure, Tomb of Horrors could nuke a 14th level party, but it's not like the stakes included Acererak leaving the tomb and wrecking their home town.  I struggle to recall a TSR adventure, or even a WOTC-era adventure, that fundamentally altered the state of the campaign if the players pulled the wrong lever or opened the wrong door.  Since 2009 there have been quite a few LOTFP adventures that can wreck your game world, but this was the first, the OG.

Naturally I wanted to make it the capstone to the Pillories campaign, our York 1630 game.

How'd we get here?  The early adventures involved the characters collecting materials for a secretive patron, The Doctor, who was researching the story of a Roman Empire era military adventurer in Caledonia, who fought against a tribe of death cultists.  The Doctor betrayed the adventurers, they killed him and took his stuff, including his notes, and now they're trying to complete his quest - to find a path towards eternal life (and loot a really old place at the same time).

Their travels took them from York to Carlisle and across the river into Scotland, traveling through Langholm and then into the nearby mountains.  There were fisticuffs with Scottish brigands, some whiskey was tasted, a truce with Clan Armstrong forged, and the malign history of the place was recounted by a parish priest who asked them to leave sleeping horrors alone.

Death Frost Doom embraces many of the tropes of classic horror - dire warnings not to trespass from a crazed hermit, a foreboding locale with frozen graves and an ominous hanging tree, and unsettling haunting effects that make the players question their faculties and doubt their senses.

I ran Death Frost Doom a decade ago with a different group, using the original printing.  This time I'm using the 2014 update, primarily because the cartography is a higher quality and the new maps look better on a virtual table top.

Here's an aside to modern designers; please consider having sanitized or VTT friendly versions of your maps available for download.  There's an OSR design trend to load the maps with GM information and reminders right on the map, which is laudable, but it creates extra work when you're converting the map to a virtual table top and you don't want to immediately spoil the players.  Besides "fog of war" and other obfuscations, the referee needs to hide secret doors, traps, and similar concealed features, usually by editing the map image in a graphics program or hiding it somehow in the VTT.

The Pillories have been sufficiently impressed with the eerie qualities of Cold Mountain (the name of the mountain top in this game world).  An eerie humming sound suffused the peak, emanating from around and beneath the endless frozen cairns and graves surrounding the lonely cabin on the mountain top.  They found the body of a man who had fled the cabin in night clothes, having died of fright or exposure in the dark of night.  (They would return to the corpse later and discover it was beginning to reanimate, fingers twitching, faint zombie groans emanating from its lips, and one of the henchmen, Wood, beheaded it with his battle axe).

The cabin had plenty of its own weird effects, whether it was a haunted harpsichord, the ancient painting from hundreds of years ago that depicted the player characters perfectly, or the weird mirror that didn't reflect the magic user or elf (which our player/sketch artist captured here, where the halfling, Remi, can't see the mage Allister or the elf Yuri in the mirror, even though they are standing right behind him).

Eventually they went through the trap door that led down into the ancient dungeon beneath the cabin.  They encountered additional weird an unsettling things, such as the room of severed skeletal left hands, the chapel with it's haunting murals, cursed altar, and weird unholy basins full of human teeth in sickly black water.  There were moments where the players were a little dumbstruck and just said, "what the f*ck?"  It's a referee's dream to stop the players in their tracks and make them say "what the f*ck?"

Zeke, the crazed hermit, had warned the players not to sleep on the mountain, a warning they took to heart after finding the frozen corpse of the guy who ran out into the night after bedding down in the cabin.  As their first day on the mountain got late, they collected his gear and headed down the mountain.  They had also been transcribing all the Duvan Ku writing they encountered, and planned to use a Comprehend Languages the next day to translate it all; our group is a mix of level 3 and level 4 characters at this point, and Allister had researched that spell during their long months of in-game downtime between Strict Time Records Must Be Kept and the start of this one.

This ended our first foray into Death Frost Doom.  More to come.  

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).