Play (Fantasy) Worlds idea proposal

In a previous post, I mentioned that I felt the FKR had largely done a poor job of articulating its extremely accessible playstyle and communicating how adapting to a trust-oriented framework can improve the play at tables. In this accusation, I point many a finger directly at myself, as a large portion of my blog and presence in gaming spaces has been an attempt to promote these ideas.

I decided that I wanted to change my attempts, instead of attempting to drive the discourse on Discord, forums, and Reddit, I think we could band together as a community and make a sort of “how-to” run a fantastical world for your friends, something that could be given to someone with zero experience as a suitable starting point.

I’ve chosen to propose a sort of zine, or maybe a book, or who knows the format – as I have been writing some of the content and thinking of pieces I would enjoy having others contribute to or even propose, it certainly seems to be growing in scope, but I do think some kind of a lean toolkit would be best.

Here is kind of what I am thinking of, just to get ideas rolling – we would start with an example of play, hopefully, pulled from an actual session run by me or some other hypothetical contributor, perhaps even link to a recorded AP on some platform. I think the introductory “what is roleplaying”, especially from an old-school, FKR standpoint is always lacking. I know because I’ve written quite a few and failed to get the idea across, and many other writers have similar experiences.

Afterward, we would then kind of tackle “fantasy” as a genre or “milieu” – talk about different kinds, the different elements, and why it makes for one of the best (if not, the absolute top) styles of settings for roleplaying games, of course with lots of Appendix-N styled references – hopefully with a lot of diversity of authors, formats, and styles.

With introductions and setting-setting 😛 done, we’d move into the meat and potatoes of FKR – what it means to run a referee-oriented game, and discuss how and why a referee would choose to use a particular rule, or procedure, or make a ruling. We’d go over various methods for setting situations for the players to respond to vs. a more open-ended “I’m here to challenge whatever goals you have” style. We will compare and contrast various forms of character creation, from “write three interesting things on your sheet” to coming up with a very detailed and world-specific life path for communicating the world to players initially.

Following this, the bulk of the book will be tables, tools, and toys for people to use. Lists of magic powers, adventure seeds found in folk tales, d<WHATEVER> angry peasants, all the kind of system-neutral “content” one can pull at whim in a game to get a situation going or to find out how something develops. I am thinking of having people go wild with tables and such they would find useful for running any fantasy game, inspired by all the various OSR table supplements.

So I have a decent number of words put together towards the start of this, and what I am looking for is both feedback so far, and probably proposals for material anyone wishes to contribute. This would be a volunteer-only gig, and I know that is a heavy ask, but I do not intend to make any money off of this – I intend for such a thing to be completely free, and would we ever do a print run, all proceeds would go towards some cause all of the contributors feel comfortable with.

I am very open to ideas and proposals of all kinds, but I should clear the air on what I am not looking for. For one, no games – I don’t think any particular rules text can be FKR. I’ve mentioned many times before, but FKR is not a number of rules, it’s how the table plays with the rules they decide to use. I also do not want any theory whatsoever. I have gone to school for game design and while I understand the benefits some analytical lenses can have over gaming, I think roleplaying theory is for the most part extremely terrible, and I think the over-excitement of theory heads rushing to taxonomize the FKR like a bunch of vulturous wanna-be anthropologists has really been a detriment to the community.

I think this should also be obvious, but I am not looking for anything that “challenges” or “argues” against FKR and “first-principles” high-trust play. If you’re going to write that one must play “with training wheels” before approaching this style, I view you as antagonistic to this project’s goals. If you believe that formalized rules can overcome failures in the social health of the table, you’re the audience for this kind of book, not the authority on it.

I also don’t mean to gatekeep, but I would like contributors to be people who have experience running in this style. I want this to be a play-focused project with examples from people who have succeeded in playing this way. I hate hypothetical play almost as much as I hate theory 😛

Let me know your thoughts as I continue to write. Also – how would people like to organize? I was thinking of starting up a Discord server, but I honestly feel Discord is kind of a horrible platform for actual discourse and organizing. Maybe keeping the whole process distributed is preferable. I guess if people do wanna yell at me on Discord you can jump into my own little sleepy server here: https://discord.gg/xZpeCShTR8

Let me know what you think!

State pt. 2, Purity Tests

I have received many messages regarding my post from yesterday, quite a lot of corroborating of the state of the discourse, as well as many individuals wondering if and what can be done to salvage online discussion around games of this type. I should first clarify that while the driving factor for me to make these posts was a “final straw” so to speak in one particular community, I have been having issues with several “FKR” communities for a while now, some less recent than others. This is very much not a one-point issue and is instead a reflection, almost every year, of what the supposed FKR communities have become, situated around when the various Discord servers kind of popped off. If you speak with anyone who has known me for more than a month you’ll probably know that I have pretty much voiced my concerns since day one.

I have also seen concerns that my post is calling for some type of purity testing – that I want only TRV3 FKR, and that I am rejecting beginners and people with alternative playstyles alike, accepting only the most Rigid of… Not Rigid Kriegsspiel 😛

This couldn’t be further from the case, and if anything – I think the current state of discourse actually prevents beginners from discovering what I think is the most compelling and table-empowering playstyle, and I think it disallows us from actually growing FKR by any stretch as if we allow the playstyle to be “just vibes”, then there are no constraints, limitations, or unique features to follow, manipulate, and then break.

The FKR is one of the few communities I have seen where a beginner will ask for advice for getting into FKR, and while there are a few voices that want to lend aid because many of the communities are concerned with the vibe and getting along more than the playstyle, they also get the complete opposite recommendation – immediately a wet blanket will be thrown on stressing that “FKR isn’t for everyone” and that one must play with training wheels and instead pick up Misspent Youth, or My Life With Master, or study the methods of setting position and risk in Blades in the Dark.

Instead of being about playing worlds, we start suggesting rules. In an almost contradictory fashion people will say “It’s not about the rules”, and then the community will go back and say things like “PbtA can have a mature statement on violence… D&D can only express capitalistic colonialism.” And my beef with that last sentence has nothing to do with the particular games expressed or the descriptors used – you could swap them out with literally any other game or adjective and I would still say it’s just as bunk. It’s saying that the play outcomes are dominated by the rules text selected.

How does one rectify this with the idea that referees are to hold rules texts lightly, utilizing them as tools to portray a world? How can we claim that one game “requires” emotional connection, and another “punishes” with zero context of how the table is addressing any of this? How are we to ascribe moral qualities to the players of a particular game without being a part of the table they are at?

FKR is about relationships – to rules, to the conversation, to other players, and to play. Certainly, some tools are better than others at certain tasks, but the practice of actually playing is so unique to the individual table instance that I think any attempt to exalt or vilify any particular ruleset in a way where you ascribe unalienable moral, ethical, or societal qualities is not only missing the point to the highest degree – it is actively toxic to what FKR can become.

I do not bemoan anyone who does not like FKR – we can like different things. I also do not bemoan those who have different perspectives on what it is (within reason) – we definitely should be bringing our unique perspectives to the table. What I bemoan is the sadness I feel when I see people who have spent a sizeable amount of time in a place that many first feel excited and ecstatic to explore a playstyle so rarely discussed these days, and they are instead dampened by naysayers and carelords, such that many feel dissuaded from contributing.

Purity tests be damned, but can we at least talk about FKR from a positive, actual play experience before we try to establish theoretical hypotheticals where we argue that the rules text conveys or holds some authority? More “play worlds, not rules” like we’ve been saying for years now?

The State of FKR Discourse

If it hasn’t been obvious from some of my recent vague-posting, I have been pretty unhappy with the state of so-called “FKR” discourse. The term was used to describe an alternative to play where rules texts were given authority, and where the fiction was secondary to the mechanics. Where the idea that social issues, bad behavior, and aggressive game masters and players alike could be curtailed by somehow following the rules as some designer intended.

Instead, it refocused the game as being a representation of a fictional world, communicated and adjudicated by a referee to players taking control of characters in a world. The referee is free to use whatever means they see necessary to portray and resolve this world and the actions of the player, and no rules text, designer, or other set of people were seen as an “authority” over this.

This idea was first proposed by one of the original players in Gary, Dave, and Phil’s games, and it was later adopted by further bloggers who ended up creating Discord servers and the like based around the acronym. It’s worth noting that this term was originally proposed on an OD&D forum, and the later Discord creators were posting a lot about the types of games that surrounded Arneson’s group. So traditional high-trust play.

There was a split in this community, as there often is. I certainly landed on the side I supported, but so did quite a few new people who were unfamiliar with these origins or goals, and seemed more inclined to foster a new identity around a term that had a very small, but growing amount of hype and recognizability around it. The conversation became less an exploration of the growing concept of FKR, and more a forcible reframing of what FKR was – which basically amounted to whatever the specific individual was playing.

I have mentioned before that it’s fine for things to be different – not every game, practice, or culture should fit under every label. What makes specific playstyles special is their unique approach, not that they are an umbrella. But this seems to be contrary in some FKR circles as of late. Instead, they claim that the FKR should be “just vibes”, only excluding the games that fall under a particular individual’s pet peeve. Which unfortunately is usually just old D&D or “traditional” RPGs. So we have gone in a few short years from an OD&D forum creating the term to people trying to gatekeep those that use the 3LBBs to only being able to “support” certain kinds of play.

Note here the emphasis on systems – folks are claiming that if one plays OD&D, or “trad” the particular rules text they are using dictates the play experience. If you understand anything about FKR at all, you will understand how this argument reveals the particular Edwardsian chauvinist has yet to understand the culture of play. Because instead of trying to understand it, they just attempted to hijack it.

A quote from one of the recent discords is as follows:

If there is no mechanical reason to be invested in the emotional story at large; there won’t be a real reason to be emotional attached to things in the game either.
– supposed “FKR” discord user

Of course, they’ll then try to do the “I am very smart” argument of citing the Lumpley-Care principle that by “mechanic” they really mean “anything by which you resolve the situation”, but this quote comes from a diatribe against traditional play in favor of storygames, so it’s pretty clear “mechanics” is precisely what the average person would think, not the Forgehead definition.

Now, I don’t think “FKR” as a term is “dead”, or any other such pretentious nonsense, but I think we should have more care in being stewards of this community. It is sad how this term has been circling around the RPG scene for about three years now, and supposed participants of the community still feel a need to play games “as they were intended.”

Despite all of this belly-aching on my part, I want some ideas on how we could be better stewards of this community: positively push forward the actual term, promoting healthy rpg conversation and high-trust tables.

I am thinking of trying to put together a zine or something similar, something I’m initially ~~ripping off~~ calling “Play Worlds.” The idea would be something like GURPS’s genre books, but obviously without the GURPS, and a little less dry. So we’d put together something like “Play Fantasy Worlds” that would be articles, advice, and tools that a table of any experience level could pick up, empower a referee to portray a world (of their own, their tables’, or another’s construction), and give players the best working advice for playing as characters in such a world with high degrees of player agency and the concept of tactical infinity (anything may be attempted, but not everything is as likely to succeed).

Let me know what you think, especially of the Play Worlds idea. Thank you!

Thought this was obvious

but when people talk about FKR, they’re not talking about Powered by the Apocalypse, Wanderhome, or Blades in the Dark.

When we say “play worlds, not rules – players take control of characters in the world, referees adjudicate it, rules are tools” sort of stuff, we don’t mean mechanizing theme or having play structures around delegating authority, and making appeals to the rules text and game designer as something that can mitigate social issues.

This isn’t a value judgment, despite fans of the above games who want to bandwagon onto whatever niche they can for marketing purposes. You can like Wanderhome, and like a “referee is the rules” game of OD&D–.

“OSR is dead” is nonsense gatekeeping

I think if you need any proof that the OSR is living is to see how much naysayers continually feel the need to tell you that it is in fact, dead. Now you might provide obvious examples to all their arguments – there are still new and changing ideas coming out of it, and there are more people playing the “style” (by which I mean old school games and games inspired by such, I am referring to a much larger player base than just people who quote the Principia Apocrypha) than ever.

One of the most important points about the OSR is that it was not a recreation of some mythologized past. When you play an OSR game, you are most likely not playing how they did in the 70s. Granted, the styles of play were so diverse that maybe you are playing something in the ballpark similar to one particular campaign back then, but most likely that’s not the case. And there was certainly not one particular style, probably from the point that Dave ran a game for Gary & co., and then Gary started running for his players.

This “OSR is dead” as a whatever scene is doing similar mythologizing – it’s pointing to a hyped subsection of one OSR scene as the scene. It’s usually saying either the scene you participated in, or the scene your friends talked about was the real OSR, and since current OSRs are different, they’re obviously artistically or stylistically or thematically or whateverically “dead.”

It’s straight-up saying “the past I remembered was the one true way, and anything that existed contemporaneously to that wasn’t really part of the OSR, and anything after it is dead/undead/unliving.”

Go grab three random adventures or games or supplements prior to 2019. Go jump on a blog, a forum, and a chat room at that period. Grab Assault on Blacktooth Ridge and The God that Crawls and tell me that those two are part of a single, centralized artistic movement. Try to tell me that the K&KA OSRIC folk were part of some central discussion with the GLOG kids.

One of the killer features of “the” OSR was that it was decentralized, so I don’t see how saying “well there are more people now so it’s even MORE decentralized” is any further indication that this concept is dead, if anything it’s proof that its growing.

I have yet to see any argument that the OSR is dead is anything more than “the past that I remembered has more positive qualities than the past I didn’t participate in, or the present that is different from what I remember or was told about.”

Doomed Reach Session 4

Characters

Amon Amarth, the Dwarf Cleric of Holy Law
Kalos, the recently masterless Magic-User
Maur Stern, Cleric of Holy Law
Cirrel, Elven Herald
Florby, Elven Alchemist
Brother Murray, Cleric of the Light Above
Ki-Mun, the Dwarven dandy
Torin, the sneaky axe-wielder

Downtime

Our characters begin by recounting prior adventurers and shoring up an additional hireling to account for previous losses.

Florby convinces his hireling, who owned a Saint’s head, to put the head in a pot of water for a week. They then paid a street urchin to drink some of the water and found it to have a mild numbing effect.

Brother Murray continued teaching his pigeon and goat more adventuring tricks.

Cirrel was granted an audience with Lady Mecit, a new-to-the-Reach noble looking to reclaim her uncle’s manor after he went mad. He retrieved more information on the manor and promised expedition funding should the party agree to it.

Adventure

Our group returned to the very chaotic caves, witnessing a floating geode on the way that radiated a freezing field, wilting the plants it came across.

As they climbed the peak above the caves, they witnessed that the cultists had rigged up some noise instruments attached to decapitated zombie heads in their wooden watchtower overlooking the gully, seemingly to drone noise when noticing nearby living. Torin snuck up to the tower and quickly dispatched the grotesque sentries.

Succeeded in preventing alarm, they went to the caves and saw a new trap rigged, a mechanism to shut a portcullis behind invaders, and opening one in the hallway to unleash zombies. Having been cautious, the party downed the zombies with ranged implements, but not before the foul undead could cause much noise.

Traversing to the south, they entered the circular chamber that held a vat of writhing, living gore. Florby begged that they determine if this monstrous flesh creature was sentient and evil. Amon Amarth interrogated the mass but determined its gasping and wailing to be that of a chaotic being.

Seeing bloody tracks on the ground leading out of the room and checking its direction revealed two giant spider beings wearing cloaks, medallions, and weapons. The adventurers engaged them in combat, casting light into one’s many eyes, blinding it, and dumping holy water and fire onto the flesh creature, which rose to strike the party.

After a short battle and only a few wounds, they chased the blind spider to a dead end. The cursed being told them it had recently been recruited by the cult with its brother and that only six other cultists remained, hurriedly trying to bolster their numbers. It also revealed to them a secret door to the outside, but this was not enough to save it, as the party imparted fatal justice to the creature.

They wandered the complex some more – finding the ruby skull room from the previous week reset, they also found a room full of bones and shattered skulls, and Cleric Stern was able to locate a small emerald within. They also retrieved some silver and a pendant from the pit of burned gore.

Progressing north, they found an altar room with black marble pillars depicting humans in agony and bronzed ritual implements, as well as a fine tapestry depicting the Sanguine Skull’s dominance. Continuing to delve, they ambushed four cultists in the middle of a ritual to empower a glowing red skull and smote these acolytes and the skull.

They finally stumbled upon a massive ritual room, with the undead head priest and his ghoulish assistants getting ready to call forth something from the dark. Amon Amarth stepped up and repelled the ghouls with his faith just before they could ring some hideous bell, while the rest of the party engaged the high priest and came out victorious, although slightly shaken by a fear spell.

The ghouls ran from the priest into a room full of skeletal statues similar to those in the ruby skull throne room. Deciding not to enter, they doused the room in oil and ignited the ghouls.

The party then went about stripping this floor of the dungeon bare of goods – tearing tapestries from the walls, plunging priests’ quarters for magical items, and returning to town with many artifacts to trade for silver, as well as the reward and praise from the Bishop.

Doomed Reach Session 3

Two-thirds of the party meet a grisly end.

Characters

Florby the Elven Alchemist
Wulfwig the Ponderous, Cleric of Light Above
Yarlexia the Elven Witch

Downtime

Throughout a week and a day, Florby decides to get completely blackout drunk, never having done so. They ask for Wulfwig to chaperone them, but the good cleric refuses. Yarlexia joins, and they meet a treasure seeker who found an ancient megalith about 40-50 miles to the southeast, ruled over by actual Harpies.

Wulfwig felt that the fortress did not have an adequate place for the followers of Light Above to worship, so he rented out a small plot of land near the market, and begin making plans to install a shrine.

Yarlexia continued to tell fortunes, and was graciously rewarded with a minor crystal ball by Lady Lecit, a residing noblewoman down on her luck.

Hirelings

Our group decided to interview quite a large number of hirelings, taking into service Hildo (lol name generators) the Aescetic, Carmox the cat-toting peasant, Fulco the Hobbit who worships a divine badger and seeks were-badger-dom, and Stalforth the archer who had been a slave to some inhuman monsters in the reach.

Yarlexia decided to sacrifice Hildo, who was noted as “having nothing” to summon yet another demon. She called out to a Prince of the Abyss, who was so offended by this offering he cursed her with a blunted intellect.

She resigned to resummoning Betsy, who gladly consumed the hireling.

Adventure

The adventurers made their way back to the caves, on the way encountered a small community of hobbits immigrating to the reach. Yarlexia paid them a sizeable portion of silver and pointed them towards the villages surrounding Fortress Solace, so they “blessed” the party by playing them a moving tune, and allowed each member to take a bite of their heirloom scone, baked ages ago and passed down through the generations.

They made their way back to the caves, where the fallen corpses had been stripped of flesh, but their bones remained. They made their way into the cult’s cave but found it strangely unguarded. To the south, where once lay a pit of zombies instead had a bubbling pit of gore, seemingly the flesh from the deceased turned into some unholy, roiling slurry. The group decided to not prod this, and made their way south to a large, vaulted room carved of dark stone. At the far end of the room sat a black throne whose seat held a large ruby, carved in the shape of a grinning skull – the symbol of the Sanguine Skull. All along the west and east walls stood twelve skeleton statues, painted red.

The party decided this was a trap, and thought to solve it after investigating the rest of the complex. Yarlexia instead convinced the demon Betsy to sprint in with her, grab the ruby and dash. As they made their way across the floor, a pit trap opened – Betsy falling to her apparent demise, while Yarlexia held onto the edge. The party intended to throw a rope to their Elven witch, but were shocked and surprised when the skeleton statues animated – they made their way over to Yarlexia and slew her, dumping her corpse in the pit. They also used their stone swords to knock Wulfwig to the floor, and then decapitated him. They also stabbed Solforth, who winced in pain and remained shocked as the party made a hasty retread back to the fortress.

Florby had grabbed Wulfwig’s head on the way out, and intended to place it in the cleric’s shrine. When the Elf confronted the Bishop Cadriel who had sent them on this mission, he was not pleased with the Bishop’s remote and uncaring response, cursing the priest and storming from the church.

Low Trust “Traditional”

I don’t know why I have been seeing a recent uptick in discussion on the “blorb” principles method of refereeing, but it seems like it has made its way back around Discord and the various microblog scenes as of late. This is not a style I would normally comment on – I see it very outside of what I like to play, especially when the author gave a very bad-faith hot-take on FKR.

But people have been making assertions about it that seem puzzling to me – they’re recommending it as an OSR prep style, for one, where I cannot fathom how it gets associated with the very emergent, high-trust style refereeing we strive for in various OSR communities.

blorb is extremely low trust – it’s a style that proposes a rigid hierarchy for the referee to follow, going so far as to hypothetically allow players to audit prep or a module to make sure that the referee didn’t supersede prep with emergent tools or fiat. It’s effectively the same sort of justification you see in communities that will allow for toxic play to flourish under the banner of “designer intent”, only the designer, in this case, is your prep.

The whole point of the referee in traditional roleplaying and adventure games is to utilize a source of higher fidelity rulings to step in when the mechanics or situation may produce fictionally inauthentic results. Or when they could use their experience, creativity, subject knowledge, and tools to arrive at a ruling quicker than mechanization could, often with a higher degree of specificity in that they as a human could take into context more elements than any rules text could.

Take for instance this example:

You have prepped a dungeon where a maniacal gnome has created a death trap dungeon. You placed a secret door to a treasure room off of some room – you have some reason why you selected this particular room and secret door setup.

Now let’s say in play that you realize your prior location is not suitable – maybe its in a place that would be generally inaccessible or dangerous for the gnome or its minions to reach. Maybe it does not line up with other emergent properties set forth by tools. Perhaps it doesn’t make structural sense once you examine the dungeon in play.

Now, you see a room that makes perfect sense for this. No sweat – the players have yet to find any hint of this secret door. They’re still at the entrance or fiddling with other elements – you can take a break and just shift the whole thing over to a place that will be more fictionally consistent with the dungeon, as well as the established elements of the gnome – such as it being an architectural genius.

By using your in-flight creativity and expertise around the fictional world you have course corrected a fictionally-inconsistent element into one that fits the setting and established lore. If you used blorb’s rigid adherence to prep you would be introducing fictional inconsistencies.

Having had this discussion with a few of the principles’ adherents, the argument I have received around this is pretty demeaning. It leverages the above as a critical mistake that the referee must work to improve (later… in other forms of prep, but never during the game). It plays into some impossible notion that one will never prep inconsistencies, or run a module that has mistakes in it.

All of this is hogwash, of course. What is better – to assume “perfection” (which I think is a demeaning way to phrase it and one that sorely misassumes the role of the referee), admonish “mistakes”, and force people to play a game that makes less sense in lip service to some arbitrary manifesto. Or is it better to allow for flexibility, trusting a referee to use whatever tools they have at their disposal, and to trust the players to converse, negotiate, and question elements to clarify the understanding of the world – to recognize that not everything is going to be perfect in prep or play, and to allow for the referee to follow their intended role and run the best game possible?

Doomed Reach Session 2

Our party eliminates half of the Cult of the Sanguine Skull.

Characters

Florby, the Elven Alchemist
Apicius, the Farming Gorumond Fighter
Brother Murray, the Cleric of Light Above
Yarlexia, the escaped slave-turned-Witch Elf
Wulfwig the Ponderous, Cleric of Light Above
Steven the non-descript, an average mentalist mage

Downtime

Florby spent the week of downtime adventuring. They were abducted by a mad noble and their entourage looking for a tournament. Arriving at an abandoned monastery that had been turned into a statuary, the noble challenged a statue, which rose to meet them and struck down the crazed gentry. In the chaos Florby escaped, but had no chance to steal any goods.

Apicius proposed that Labrix the hireling wed his cousin, and tend to his farm, and in exchange, Apicius would eventually give Labrix his own sheep flock. The hireling agreed, and in the revelry of the wedding, Apicius became drunk and got into the losing side of a knife fight.

Brother Murray spent the week training his animals to obey simple commands, as well as investigating the locked box the party had acquired last session, finding it magical.

Yarlexia told fortunes and read tarot, receiving a working wage of silver.

Wulfwig decided to drink the week away, falling in with some bandits known as Hegrit’s Harpies, and suffered a massive hangover.

Session Report

Florby tried to pick the lockbox but got sprayed with acid, receiving notable scars to their torso, inhibiting breathing for a while. Inside lay an iron statue of a dwarf, carved into it a curse one could levy at an adversary to “ruin their fingers.”

Yarlexia attempted to summon a demon, slaying a scoundrel from the Copper Cockatrice to do so and called into her protection a humanoid pig/owl demon named Bechisi, who Yarlexia renamed Betty.

The group returned to the cult’s hideout, finding a massive wasp nest on the ascend, and ambushing the two huntsmen who served as guards, learning a bit more of the cult’s intentions, which mostly dealt with traversing through cycles of undead and rebirth.

Yarlexia took the form of one of the hunters and investigated the cave, while the others prepared to tumble rocks and even the tower if need be when enemies were drawn out.

Yarlexia spoke the cult’s secret phrase given to her by the hunter, which turned out to be a signal – the cultist she was conversing with sounded an alarm, ran behind a portcullis, and unleashed a horde of zombies. She began her escape back to the entrance, but as she made her way down the hallway – guards from the other direction were marching at her with bows, she decided to unleash Betsy upon them and make her way out of the cave.

The party waited as zombies followed out, saving the avalanche for the many cultists who came later to see if their pets had dispatched the invaders. The flesh of these dead cultists drew the zombies, and the party made quick work of them as well.

They also witnessed unusual, chaotic operations in the gully before the cult’s cave – dogmen crawling out of a bubbling pit of earth, and a massive bull-headed man disgusted by the carnage before the cult cave.

Entering into the cult complex, they found Betsy had fallen into a pit trap, and freed it – but were immediately attacked as the demon was no longer bound to Yarlexia. In the combat, Yarlexia continued to intone pacts and words of command and was eventually able to wrest Betsy back to her side.

The group proceeds north, finding four acolytes in a store room. They enter into combat and their hireling Hingle is decapitated by an acolyte. Eliminating two in combat, they get the other half to surrender, and piece out a few more details of the cult before delivering justice to these foul necromancers.

Having eliminated half of the cult’s numbers, losing a hireling, and taking some damage from the combats, they decide to make it back to Fortress Solae and recuperate before a final? assault on the cult.

Doomed Reach Session 1

Yesterday I kicked off an in-person open-table game here in L.A. using a hack of OD&D plus a lot of various hex-crawl tools mashed together.

The intent behind this campaign is to get as close to a West Marches as is feasible – I’ve run one successful West Marches late in college, and while I have tried a few times after that I’ve never breached the point of referee scheduling games to players scheduling games. I have a hope we can in this game, but I am not making it an outright goal, instead, I’m letting players loosely provide availability over the week, and if they schedule a game in my availability that’s great – otherwise I’m happy to book the sessions.

I had six players initially, for the first session I almost thought to have eight, but that would have been too difficult, as I was having trouble hearing even the middle of the table at points in the game store. So six players is a great amount, as long as I work to clarify what players say.

Characters

Our six characters were (and apologies to players if I’ve spelled the names wrong, feel free to correct me):

Florby, the Elven Alchemist
Apicius, the Farming Gorumond Fighter
Leandril, the tough-love Elven Fighter
Brother Murray, the Cleric of Light Above
Yarlexia, the escaped slave-turned-Witch Elf.
Wulfwig the Ponderous, Cleric of Light Above

Session Report

Our party met in the Copper Cockatrice, the local mercenary haunt and drinking hole in Fortress Solace. Amidst wine and banter, the party sought out a small collection of adventure hooks, including:

A map purchased from a mourning Hobbit, having lost his companions to a crow demon at the end-point of their quest for treasure.
Investigation of, and eventual elimination of a Chaos cult rumored to be abducting children, northwest of the fortress, paid for by a Bishop of the Church of Holy Law.
A mining collapse in a small village of Bryny to the West uncovered an ancient Lightbringer temple, with the Church wanting such a site cleared out and sealed off immediately.

Having questioned the drunk Hobbit, our party heard horrific tales of a crow demon that slew his companions. Citing the fact that mundane weapons could not hurt the beast, the party instead decided to pursue the more local option of investigating the cult.

They interviewed and hired a slew of hirelings, including:

Drogos the Mercenary, is a stout fellow who has experience with soldiering.
Labrix the Link-Boy. A young herder who lost his flock, and wishes to scrounge up enough silver for an impressive herd.
Hingle the Thug. A tall fellow with many notable facial scars and missing teeth, they wield a nasty hunting knife and has a conflicting relationship between his religion and his zeal for violence.

They also interviewed another henchman with wild eyes and a big beard who began shaking excitedly and licking his lips when the topic of combat was broached, but the party decided his eagerness was a step too far for their liking (as of now 😉)

While the party conducted these interviews, Yarlexia pandered traveling merchants with tarot and fortunes, playing to their egos, and earning enough payment for two silver pieces.

To The Caves

Our party marched off into the wilderness, seeking a strangely fresh forest to the northwest of the fortress. Easy going along the plains brought them to the border of these woods, whereupon they spied a Gnome burrow, a strange fellow named Fluppix had been drawn to recent migration in the area and he decided to start up a bakery and “art experience” to take advantage of the hinterland populace.

The party decided to partake in his venture, although Brother Murray thought better of the situation and kept watch. They ate the Gnome’s tasty bread and were subject to a rather rough massage (Fuppix’s chosen “art” for the day). Utilizing the time to question the Gnome, they did discover that a few dozen folks were camped somewhere nearby and that they did have Gnome-sized beings with them. Apicius provided the Gnome with an onion to feed his “children”, which turned out to include a rather portly badger.

The Gnome pointed out where they headed off to, noting that a troll cave lay between them, best to be avoided. Avoided this ominous cave they did, and found an oval-shaped valley beyond, beset by cliffs to the west, north, and south. Instead of pressing head-on, our group thought it better to circle around to the rear of these cliffs, gaining a vantage point over the many caves below.

Atop this crest, they discovered a camouflaged, but unoccupied watchtower or hunter’s lodge. Rooting around they found a spear and some items, as well as a buried lockbox in the earthen floor below. Brother Murray and Leandril kept watch and saw a hunter stalking a deer in the woods below. After felling the deer, the hunter sounded a horn, which drew members out of one cave to retrieve this deer, while the hunter made their way back to the watchtower.

Our party debated capturing or dispatching this hunter but decided discretion was better, leaving everything but the lockbox and making their way into a dense thicket for cover.

Yarlexia used her witchcraft to assume the guise of the Hunter and entered the caves below. She was met with a robed acolyte, wielding a metal staff whose end terminated in two collared zombies. Yarlexia played it off as if she had brought more food (in the form of her own sheep and goat), and the acolyte told her that the deer was more than enough to get them through the summer. He insisted instead that the goat, Luna, should have its name transcribed in the Book of Blood and enter into unlife as a new guardian for the community.

Yarlexia hesitantly agreed, but mentioned that she felt that she was ready to conduct the ritual herself, and would make her way into the ritual chamber. Passing by the guard she realized the cult’s complex was very deep, and she feared her illusion wearing off, so she turned and stabbed the cultist, calling out to any spirits or demons for protection. She was answered by a fell spirit demanding more supplication and ritual before providing aid.

Deciding against partaking in a full-blown ritual at the cave entrance, she grabbed the acolyte’s religious symbol, a blood-red skull, as well as the dual man-catcher zombie apparatus and returned to the group.

The party decided to make haste and double back to the fortress to provide proof to the bishop of the cult. They were promptly rewarded, and our session closed.

Referee Notes

Hopefully, I did the session justice, and apologies to any players whose antics or quips I may have missed. Running a pretty generative-oriented hex crawl involves juggling quite a lot of details at once, so I unfortunately sometimes misremember a few details.

Overall this was a fun session. Time was a little packed as half the session included character creation and setting summary, so I couldn’t quite get the spotlight on everyone as I would have wished, but I think there’s a decent way forward for everyone to grow and drive goals and ambitions.

I am running this game in real-time, so the party may have a week or more to carouse, do downtime, research, etc. before deciding if they want to fight this cult or go about another hook.

If you happen to be in the L.A. area and are interested in playing, definitely drop me a message and I’ll shoot you a player survey!