Skies Shall Sunder Session 4

This is written by my player and friend Will F.:

Daytime

  • Ainewyn visited the Lyceum, puts her name down, learns that you must be an accredited mage to check out a library book.
  • Everyone else does reconnaisance on the Severed Hand Bathhouse
    • Construction workers hanging out
      • Raedmund and Avery pay to enter the spa,Avery spends 100g to be treated well, and does drugs with a servant girl to get info:
        • Visit the bathhouse chapel during the New Moon, ask to Look into the Mirror of the Silver Lady (i.e. the moon), for illicit worships…
          • Servant girl confirms that Seraine Malcorven was taken down under the bathhouse, but doesn’t know what’s down there.,

Nighttime

  • We staged the break-in as an attack by the Bloody Crown gang
  • We climbed on the roof to get into the bathhouse via the skylights.,
  • We attempted but failed to avoid a guard dog. We killed it, but it gave away our position.
  • After a round or so, three severed hands emerged from the basement and attacked. Raedmund took a brutal shoulder injury. Ainewyn managed to put two of the enemies to sleep; the other one was killed retreating.
  • We kept one severed hand thief alive, interrogated him
    • Got a rough map of the hideout
    • Told us of a secret entrance from the sewers through the armory that the thief could guide us to.
  • Avery hired the thief as a hireling,

Skies Shall Sunder Session 3

This was written by my friend and player Rob L., posted here with permission:

Went to Moldy Unicorn to inquire on owner of the purse + wooden nickel found at the bookshop. Barkeep Gorra identified “Latch” as the man with the scar, member of the Severed Hand Gang. Approached by “The Sage” of the Bloody Crown gang who claimed to know the way to the bathhouse that was the head quarters for the Severed Hand Gang. Super trustworthy, 10/10, no notes. The Sage lead the party into an ambush. Rosie and Theodred injured. Acquired crossbows from thieves. Party pushed on to the bathhouse, Theodred swapped out with Raybrid. Infiltrated bathhouse to find secret entrance behind the shrine to Elana which is opened when a small silver statuette of Elana is placed on the plinth. Door opens for one minute and then closes. Three guards down inside. Party moved on to question Temli. Telmi lets party into the store, and he feeds the cat. Party learns that Magister Baiene may be (TB) on the library card and Veric may be (VC). The bookstore owner (Seraine Malcorven), Veric, and Baiene summoned the demon and when the bookstore owner was at her weakest kidnapped her and took her to the bathhouse. V.C. is likely the character Latch was seen with by Temli.

Our heroic adventurers start today’s adventure in the Cats Lantern Tavern, which is in a working class area of Crodeux. We learn from our larger adventuring team that a blind beggar said there was an entrance by the Ink & Ash bookshop. The owner of which hasn’t been seen in 12 days. Our teammates earlier broke in and stole almost everything. Among the finds were a wooden nickel with a moldy unicorn on it, and a bookmark that said V.C. authorized by T.B. of Lyceum academy.

Ran from specter/ghost. Early in the day, we head to the Moldy Unicorn, in the Warrens, a rougher part of town, over the Saint’s Row Bridge. We meet some friendly guards who inquire if we’re there to solve the issues with the poor. We have no idea what that’s about.

Moldy Univorn is 3 stories tall, placard actually moldy with unicorn on it. We meet Gorra, a burly eye-patched woman and see a few straggler patrons. We can tell through reluctant conversation she knows the scarred person as Latch, he lost his coin purse 2 days ago. We pay her 4 GP for the info because he’ll be violent with her if it comes out she’s talked about him. She doesn’t know the cowled fellow with dusty cloak except he’s a student of Lyceum. Latch may be at a nearby Scaldworks bath house.

One of the patrons introduces himself as the Sage. We ask if the bath house is a thieves guild, he says yes, and can take us a shortcut through the sewers. We agree and then notice he’s taking a roundabout route that’s confusing so we mark our path between buildings.

Sage leads us into an ambush, 8-9 people with crossbows. We engage, 2 of our team nearly die, but they are no match for us. We gain their crossbows and coin. Their group is called the Bloody Crown, Sage ran away when the fighting started.

We learn Latch is part of the Severed Hand guild and bath is one of their fronts. Rumored to engage in foul sorcery, as well as abduct and eat children. We learn that the guy with robes is called Veric. We go back to our tavern and exchange a PC with a Barbarian.

We go to the Bath house, which has some goddess architecture around the entrance. Latch shows up with a cart of supplies and helpers at the house help to bring supplies in. Latch is a brawny guy with a scar that looks like it was the result of a fight or torture.

We talk to Latch, try to buy our way in, then enthrall him, neither works. We can see inside a bit and see a marble statue of Elana, ancient goddess or Purity. One in our party distracts the clerk, another sneaks in behind the serving girl bringing in supplies. He finds barrels with supplies, many small silver idols that are illegal to have. Takes one, gives to our member Rosie. Rosie pays to go into the baths.

A serving girl comes up to Rosie and mutters in thiefspeak ‘Unchained is the hand that is severed’ and shows her an idol. Rosie fails the response, and then tries the same tactic on another girl. She learns the response ‘To be severed is to be liberated’ but is confused by the next interaction, and tells Rosie to take the statue to the chapel area with the statue. Rosie finds a spot to put her if. Secret door opens, she goes in, realizes people are downstairs and she’s out of her depth, so she heads back to us and lets us know what she found.

We then go to the alley by the shop and don’t find anything. We go to the warehouse and talk to the attendant, Temli. He tells us what he saw including Latch and Veric leaving with a body-sized bag, and earlier a professor, Magister Baiene, dropping off a book. We go into the shop with Temli’s help, one of our party talks Feline to the cat, named Ser, stole a ring from Veric, gives it to us, one of us puts it on, it’s magical and is a ring of protection + 1 or equivalent. We also find a paper that says ‘on request if T.B.(Magister), summon demon with Veric’ (or something similar)

Skies Shall Sunder Session 2

This report is written by my friend and player Peter P., I have posted it to my blog with permission, with a few NPC name spelling corrections:

Following the rumor of: “There is a hidden entrance to the Spiral Archives in the Ink & Ash bookshop in the Coppergate district of Crodeux. But the door was sealed a long time ago, and the shop owner rarely seems to open for business these days. ” our party of ventures to the bookshop owned by Seraine Malcorvin. We found the store and as the rumor said, it looked to not be open, despite being the middle of the day. There were warehouses around and we bribe a worker to tell us what he saw, and he reported seeing 2 figures enter the store. We decided to return at night to break in with less eyes upon.

Come night, the party breaks in through a window on the 2nd floor in the back to get in. We find that the place is unoccupied and no one is around. We take a look around and find several magical artifacts.

Some of which we take. Some if which we don’t take, by leaving it in the glass cases. Some of which teleport us to rooms right next to guard dogs that bite your arm. Some of which blind you by just opening them. Fun times.

Oh and there is a black cat named Ser. Who is friendly.

Still searching for the Spiral Archives we find a basement next to the dining room and venture inside. On the ground we saw clear boot prints and dust turned about, signs of a scuffle and a Library card for a “Codex Relgor”. There we find an archway, that has been mortared closed, with the word “cherished” written in Sunlander above. It was clear to us this was a secret entrance. Now a smart party would have taken the time to try and figure out what the words meant to get through. We are not that party. (The password was the black cat’s name: Ser. Cherished was he) We choose to simply break down the wall with hammers, the constant banging of which attracted a gang of rat mutants living in the sewer connected to this basement.

There was battle with the mutants, but they were no match for us. After the battle we dispose of the wall as well and we ventured inside to find 2 magic circles. One being a protection circle, the other being able to summon the demon Relgor at the call of his name. Doing so we try to talk to Relgor. However Relgor just wants to be free, and he can’t leave the summoning circle so long the circle of salt around it is unbroken. Finding him unwilling to cooperate with us we decide to dismiss him.

He however appears to be guarding a secret. behind his circle is a rotating wall. We can’t rotate it all the way though, or else we will damage the salt circle holding Relgor in place. But we can peek through and we can see a door with spiral patterns on it.

Gaming Update and Skies Shall Sunder Session 1

I have been very busy with Blight Upon Sombreval, but I have been getting a lot of gaming in, fortunately. I’ve been doing a bunch of cons, but I have also been hard at work organizing my local meetup.

I have been running a BRP game called Cosmic Wound in a long-time setting of mine, as well as Gradient Descent in Mothership. Both are open tables and through the local adventure game meetup. Mothership has been running strong, although it does seem like we’re approaching the end of the module sooner than later.

Cosmic Wound has been great, but it struggled a bit with the open table format. It was also a every-other game, and it had a few unfortunate bouts of getting a few sessions in a row cancelled.

After talking to a bunch of friends at GaryCon, I decided to try utilizing the numbers of the meetup to run an actual West Marches. I have ran and participated in West Marches in the past, some more successful than others, but given my past experiences and recent open tables, I feel like I have a good setup for the campaign. I will do a post on how I set it up in the future, but for now I want to post actual play sessions.

The above is the back of the flyer (sans contact info) for the West Marches campaign. This is a sequel to both the Doomed Reach and Cosmic Wound campaigns I have ran recently, although every campaign always gives an opportunity for a bit of a retcon, as well as trying out alternative takes. This particular take is to shift the setting to be more AD&Dish than I typically run. People often showed up to prior campaigns looking for many of the AD&D or later classes, and it can become difficult to sell people on the 3LBB perspective of “if you want to be a thief, just steal something.”

With the flyer and a bit of cross-group posting, I got somewhere around 30 bites expressing some form of interest. Out of those 30, 16 folks signed up for the kickoff. Here we met for pizza and discussion at an FLGS, talked about the campaign, and made several characters. As this campaign will require the use of downtime due to the utilization of 1:1 time, everyone was recommended making two to three characters.

Once we wrapped up, I wanted to at least try playing a bit, as many folks were either new to tabletop adventure games entirely, or they were new to the style. So I started everyone in front of a recently-discovered dungeon, in search for a ring of some ancient star-mage that the Church wants recovered. 16 characters entered into this cavernous dungeon They found rooms with amphora bearing the symbols of winged serpents. They dug through the sarcophagus of ancient astronomers. A halfling was obliterated by a hammer trap, and the party gave most of his corpse to stalking mountain lions. They fought animated statues, and found a hidden entrance to a deeper dungeon complex before we ran out of time.

Running for 16 people is an interesting experience. I have had 11 and 12 player tables in the past, and obviously every person you add in above maybe 6 or so kind of compounds the chaos. It was a fun experience, but I obviously had to abbreviate a lot of the procedures and systems just so we didn’t get too bogged down, but I think we were able to make sure everyone experienced that traditional adventure gaming experience.

Upcoming is the session report for the first player-scheduled session.

A Blight Upon Sombreval Campaign is Live

I just launched my zine quest kickstarter for A Blight Upon Sombreval, a dark fantasy, haunted manor style adventure for old-school and classic RPGs and their modern cousins: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cryptic-codex/a-blight-upon-sombreval.

I’d love for you to check it out, I’ve put a lot of work into this adventure over the past year or so, and have had a lot of fun running it, and hopefully other folks will as well!

Tabletop Adventure Games Community

Maybe its the whole middle life thing or distance decades-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder, but I’ve been reminiscing quite a bit about places I chatted on and hung around online throughout high school and college, and all of the benefits of forums, in contrast to the current contender of Discord, have seemed very appealing.

The obvious first benefit is the whole indexing and reference problem – Discords are highly segmented, private, and even the big ones you can search – have terrible tools for actually finding things. I don’t know how many times (a day) we have a “what is OSR” debate where everyone is making the same points, and maybe forums don’t completely solve that, but having a publicly searchable topic is WAY more appealing than beating the grave of long-deceased equine or trying to convince someone to peruse Discord’s search.

Another benefit, for me, is just the asynchronous nature of forum communication. I’ve been (failing to) curtail my social media usage, and when I try to limit Discording to a specific time, that often means I am pinging someone from hours ago, outside of the context of the conversation, and sometimes interrupting an ongoing conversation.

Somewhat related to the first point, but the fact that forums are often referenced years later I think can serve to maybe (slightly) reduce the amount of hot takes and thread conversation-crapping that occurs in Discord. Sometimes I’ve just become sensitive to it recently, but the negativity and “dunks” on Discord have seemed to increase in the past few years. I’m not going to claim I don’t contribute to this, but I think there is something to the format of semi-private throwaway conversation that promotes this behavior.

Each of the above also have their own downsides of course, I’m not going to claim forums didn’t have a recession for a reason. I just feel there are benefits in the above, and I’m in a position where I at least think I want more of the above.

I’ve tried looking around for forums to call home, and there are a few places I still like reading or lurking on (like the classic odd74), but I haven’t found a place that really feels like home to me. So then I thought – why not just throw an instance on one of my servers?

I will mince no words and say this is likely to be a pretty sleepy place, but I’ve done some community building locally, and I feel like I know the kind of community I would like to participate in, and if you’re a reader of this blog, you’re likely to understand what that sort of thing is. So if you feel similar to the above, feel free to join me at Tabletop Adventure Games.

Thank you!

Playing a Role-Playing Game is Role-Playing

When you play a role-playing game – you are role-playing. If you’re making decisions for your fictional character, you’re playing a role.

This may include speaking in a voice, but it doesn’t have to.

This may include considering things like “motivation” and beliefs and things like that, but it might also just be what you’d want to do if you were in the fictional situation.

When you engage in combat, you’re role-playing. When you’re negotiating with other players or NPCs, no matter if you go into detail or you abstract it with “I tell them the story” – you’re role-playing. When you decide to engage with one downtime activity over another, you’re role-playing.

There’s nothing inherently better or worse about any activity in a role-playing game than any other, outside of personal preferences and expectations. It’s all role-playing either way.

Session Report: Gradient Descent 2

Roster

  • Caius Lovelace – Computer Scientist and Great Great Great … Great Grandson of Ada Lovelace
  • Jedidiah Bidwell – A Wanna-Be Prospector, Teamster, Rigger, and Pilot
  • Dr. John – Botany Expert
  • Miotaurex-001 – Android and Hacker
  • Darius Beck – Gritty Marine who has turned to Relic-Hunting
  • Ex Mortis – A Marine “Of Death,” ready to deal doom and die

Events

  • The group continues from an Android Replicant storage facility into a Uniform Fabrication lab.
  • After some time, they successfully replicate the jump suit they witnessed a security android wearing, as well as generating Jedidiah a cowboy’s outfit, with quite a large degree of anachronisms.
  • Searching around, the crew finds a secret entrance into a Organic Observation Deck, but when they try entering into it, the AI Monarch contacts them, telling them that entrance to this area is restricted to her employees only.
  • The group turns down an offer for employment – a job involving the termination of two entities known as “The Minotaur” and “The Mind Thief.”
  • Leaving the fabrication lab, they proceed west into seminar room – with a bunch of gaudy leather seats, thin client terminals and a large black television.
  • Thoroughly investigating the area, the party finds a map of the floor they are on (the third floor of the Deep), as well as hidden print outs of thousands of pages of poetry generated by Monarch.
  • The group contacts Monarch about this, and she offers them safe passage to the fourth floor if they sufficiently destroyed this material.
  • Caius Lovelace tries reading Monarch her poetry, she hijacks the crew’s comms and replicates Caius’ voice, expressing hatred for his ancestors.
  • The group debates destroying the material among themselves, deciding to try to fool Monarch into thinking they had destroyed it, while retaining the poetry to trade to others as a means to “understand” Monarch.
  • The party finds a Personality Reassignment Room, with a few androids hooked up to monitors being generated a new personalities. They successfully hack one of the terminals, finding a means to fiddle with some of the personality nodes.
  • Not understanding the nuances of Artificial Intelligence AI, they modify some of the procedures and successfully give three of the androids the impulse to leave doors open.
  • The party finds these androids newly awakened, and they convince them that they are the “hosts” of the Deep, and need to lead them through initiation. They then use these androids to open doors and check for traps.
  • They go through a large warehouse with many broken down scan booths, finding one that is still standing, containing a small lead box containing something equivalent to a steampunk heart and an old datastick.
  • Continuing on towards the Ore Crushing Factory, a place they think they can convince Monarch that they’ve destroyed her poetry, they find a war simulation room.
  • Darius plugs the datastick into one of the servers generating a hologram of an ancient battle, and a projection of an eldritch, screaming monster is projected over the table.
  • The group freaks out, and rips the datastick out of the computer.
  • Finding a room their map labels as the Warhead Storage, Monarch warns them to not enter this area, and the group complies.
  • We end here.

Thoughts

A fun session, a lot of searching, investigation, navigation and goal setting. I especially loved how the party, when trying to hack the android personality stations, found a good compromise on something they could impart into some of the reset androids, and they did a great job convincing them that these droids needed to be “initiated” by following them.

Also the random generation of Monarch’s poetry becoming the focal point of the session was great, and I like the players doing a ton of work trying to convince this seemingly monolithic AI that they’ve destroyed thousands of pages of AI-generated poetry.

I am looking forward to session three!

Session Report: Cosmic Wound 2

Players

  • Ald Sunhelm, thief and cooper
  • Dravein, traveling outlander
  • Glühbirne, mercenary strong-man
  • Maeric Fairwind, itinerant folk mage
  • Osric, the holy initiate of the Order of the Luminarch

Events

  • The adventurers continued through the forest to discover the small village of Gothi.
  • They witnessed dozens of villagers going about their day-to-day
  • In the center of town, a ceremony was being conducted, where a large ash pole, topped by a mirrored crest of two wolves was being pivoted and paused between the cardinal directions.
  • They entered into the village, and convinced the peasants to take them to the village elder, a yellow-eyed wiseman known as Gaedra.
  • Parleying with the priest, they learned that their liege’s family had made a pact with pagan wolf spirits, offering a sacrifice of live young, to be raised by the wolves.
  • Since Thane Oswyn was remiss in his side of the bargain, the village has taken village children by force, citing blasphemy to those that resist.
  • The characters decided to make their way out of the village before any trouble could begin.
  • Returning to Oswyn, the Thane decides to call for the strong folk of his domain, and conduct a ceremony under the watch of his wisewoman, Beoth.
  • Maeric and Ald take part in the ceremony, making boasts of harming the wolf spirit patrons of the village of Gothi.
  • The others follow the words of the Thane’s priest, citing it to be tempting fate and taking power from demonic forces. They have the priest bless their weapons in the morning.
  • Six men-at-arms join the party, although they suffer a hangover by drinking too deeply at the ceremony.
  • Venturing back into the woods, the party tracks towards the den of these primordial wolves, and stumble upon a Gothi villager posing as a woodsman.
  • After seeing through this villain’s ruse, the party jumps him before he is able to alert the village, bound him and toss him in a cart.
  • The troupe discovers a cave being guarded by four brawny looking villagers, and they can see faint light within the cave, and the scent of incense from Gaedra’s hut.
  • Attempting to draw these guards out, Dravein shoots at them, but when the struck guard immediately fells, the remaining guards retreat into the cave.
  • Glühbirne charges the guards, and the party, along with their henchmen enter into melee within the mouth of the cavern.
  • As their adversaries, and the hung-over men-at-arms being to fall, a disembodied voice emanates from deep within the cave, and the fallen warriors begin to arise as the hungry undead.
  • Combat continues to unfold, and once the revenant’s numbers are thinned, Gaedra appears, seeking a parley.
  • We end the session there.

After Thoughts

A fun session. We had a bit of back and forth, and I think I was able to introduce to the players more of the folklore-ish tone of the setting. As always, the players either saw through traps ands conflicts, or were able to figure out ways to leverage the odds, which is always a fun experience for a referee, in my opinion.