Tag: west marches

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.

Doomed Reach

I have started running a West Marches-styled game over Discord/Roll20 named “The Doomed Reach.” This came about mostly because of my move from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and wanting to stay in touch with many of my gaming groups, both face-to-face as well as online.

So far we have done two character creation sessions with supplemental world building. I spent a few weeks coming up with a hex map, adding materials to it, building a little bit of lore, etc. But I also wanted the players to have some input into the setting.

Obviously with something like a West Marches, the content requirement prevents players from being able to ad-hoc add tons of material in (or at least, it prevents it in terms of my preferences), so I used the system from Beyond the Wall’s Further Afield – players get to add a feature from a random table, and then other players get to embellish on the detail. All of this is delivered in-character, and the Referee rolls in secret how accurate their description is.

So this allows players to add new stuff to the setting, and I get to keep the tied together bits of dungeons and lore that I want. I intend to run this setting relatively anti-canon – one player decided to play a Kobold, and while I told him I’d prefer if he played a dog-kobold, he could do whatever. I fully intend to lean on him for all things Kobold related. Equally a player decided she had been swept up by missionaries who had deemed her cursed and sinful, and now she walks away wondering the reach of the religion that raised her – that player is going to be my main source of info for that sort of religion.

I’ll be posting some lore details and session reports as they come, right now I have a bunch of material I need to prep for the first actual adventuring session.