Tag: openquest

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.

Session Report: Cosmic Wound Session 0 + more

I recently pivoted my almost-two-year OD&D open table to two different open table campaigns, this one, a sort of eldritch, dark fantasy game inspired by stuff like Averoigne, Berserk, We Are All Legends, Lovecraft, and plenty more, titled “Chronicle of the Cosmic Wound,” and a campaign of Gradient Descent. Eventually I’ll write a retrospective on the OD&D game, but for now I’ll go over Cosmic Wound’s session zero, and the hour or two we got to play before our time limit was reached.

I pitched Cosmic Wound as a dark fantasy setting I’ve been working on for some time, although “lower” magic than the OD&D game we had been playing, with a higher emphasis on stuff like Hammer Horror and some Cosmic Horror stuff. To serve this premise, as well as to hopefully address some of the open table issues I was having, I decided to turn the BRP nob on my home system WAY up, using effectively a homebrewed version of OpenQuest 3e, plus some Dark Ages Cthulhu and Mythras material in it.

My players had all voted for this game via a pitch doc where I outlined the CATS of the game – so they were at least familiar with the pitch. Here is the text of that pitch content:

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