Friday 26 April 2019

Session 221 - Around Yourselves, Watch For Elves

A dungeon! A real one!
After a mad night of feasting on flesh and taunting a young girl into eating the heart of her friend, the gang decide to continue checking out the valley of the Flitting Gads. Unfortunately it's the time of the New Moon when they're at their strongest. Interesting choice... Damnation Snels steps sideways. Jasmine gets peer-pressured. Andromeda needs a hit. Red loses a friend.
DJ feeds a bear. Barrett hides a horse.

Maps:
Some Artist's Impressions of the Super-Gads:








Session 221 - Around Yourselves, Watch For Elves


Date:
14 years after the End.
June 8. New Moon.


Characters:

New Character Origins:
- Privateer Barrett: A sailor on a privateer vessel before the End, he survived the sea turning to blood and managed to make it into the Storm-Shell before the gas hit. Unfortunately he was carried off by a giant bat creature at some point and has been hiding in its cave ever since. Kept his spyglass secret and safe in his prison pocket.


- Jasmine: Sophia’s room mate and leatherworker by trade. As a Flibbertigibbet, a Message Elf, she was on her way to deliver a missive to Sophia when she found her burnt and ruined corpse floating downstream towards her. Sophia’s spellbook-dress was mysteriously intact, however.




Character Backstories:
- Dustin Johnson: As a primary instigator of the Johnsonian UFO cult, he has built up an adoring following of fanatics who love to hear about the tales of the modern conveniences. Henchmen standing next to you are immune to morale.




Valuables:
- 49 Bat Rations (49 exp) - 64 coins (7 exp) - Book #145 - Azoth & Aether (100 exp)- Book #147 - Jesus (100 exp)
- Book #161 - Death & Sainthood (100 exp)
- Book #247 - Insects & Arthropods (100 exp)
- Potion #136 - Effervescent blue, smells sweet and fizzy
- Potion #144 - Swirling orange, smells like blood.
- Potion #211 - Bubbly yellow, smells like boiled cabbage.
Total: 456 exp


Dungeon Exploration:
- First party to enter the Non-Euclidean Sanctum (400 exp)
- 1 Wandering Monster (50 exp)
- 8 Dungeon Rooms explored (160 exp)
Total: 610 exp


Murders:
- 1 Flitting Gad (500 exp)
Total: 500 exp


Events:

--- Papa Snels Bags a Bat
- Hiding in a cave in the side of a ravine, hearing distant groans echoing in from the valley walls, the rest of the party decide to dig themselves into the thick guano to hide from the bat monster when it eventually returns.
- The fell sounds eventually stop. Half an hour or so later, a very drunk bat creature with Damnation “Daddy” Snels riding on its back stumbles back into its lair. It shrugs the old man off its shoulders and fumbles along the wall, then falls into a contented heap in the middle of the cave and motions for him to come give it a contented post-coital cuddle.



- Damnation Snels shoots it in the fucking head.
- As the gunpowder-smoke clears the others pull themselves out of the guano to find Damnation Snels standing, pantsless, with his musket pressed against the monster’s temple and its brains splattered across the cave floor.


--- Expedition Night 1: Bat Soup
- Waste not want not! The bat is carved up by those who aren’t forbidden by their God from wielding edged weapons. It’s a lot of meat.
- Since it’s coming up to evening, they decide to cook up a nice meal with the fresh meat. Fucked Bat Stew results from incorporating bat meat, bread and wine into leftover Traveller’s Stew. It’s surprisingly fine, despite the strange decision to add guano to the dish, and fittingly grants a bonus to Backstab.



- The “interesting” smell brings forth a new party member, who was hiding underneath the pallet bed deeper into the cave. Privateer Barrett, an ex-sailor, shuffles in begging for some Traveller’s Stew and presenting a soiled spyglass for inspection. Given the general mania of the bat-eaters, he’s accepted without question.


--- Jasmine Follows the Riverside
- It’s been a hard day for Jasmine. She was meant to be bringing a message to her roommate Sophia, and instead she found her burnt and ruined corpse floating in the stream. Now carrying her dead friend, she stumbles upriver unsure of what she should do next.
- From a cave up high on the valley wall, there is a sudden shout! It’s a bunch of people yelling down at her. It’s hard to hear what they’re saying at first, but it amounts to “Eat the heart you wuss! Eat Sophia’s heart! She’d have done it to you! Eat it!!!”
- Sobbing and mumbling that it’s not true, Sophia was a nice person, Jasmine is peer pressured into eating her dead friend’s heart. The tears roll down her cheeks as the power of Sophia’s heartspell merges with her own. The last sliver of the moon shines pale above. Jasmine knows it’s only a day until the Wild Hunt comes with the New Moon to punish those who break the heart-taboo...



- She walks beneath the cave entrance where the bat-maddened people laugh and jeer from above. One holds a rope, another chucks another heart down to her. In unison those above start jeering again, telling her to eat this heart too! Eat the heart! Eat it!!!
- Jasmine does so, horrified, and grabs the rope when it’s lowered to her. The hearts sit heavy in her belly. What a horrible day. She ignores the capering madmen and hides in the cot room, sobbing as she decodes the spells locked within Sophia’s dress, and hears the people lying in the guano fall to sleep as evening turns to night.


--- Expedition Day 2: An Early Start
- In the darkness of the pre-dawn, holding lanterns against the dark, the party decides to check out these caves before the Gads emerge. With luck they’ll be able to murder them in their beds.
- The majority shimmy down ropes to the valley floor, while Jasmine stays up in the cave with her beam rifle. She’s not risking herself for these arseholes.
- The stream at the valley floor is easily traversed despite being deep enough to carry off a twelve year old, so they jump across to approach a low cave mouth on the other side. There’s gravel scree rising up a shallow ramp towards the opening and a heavy musky smell.
- Barrett sneaks up to the opening and peeks inside. In the lantern-light he sees a furry shape and hears a low growl. A bear! Andromeda approaches and the bear grumbles out of the cave, snuffling around, completely calm.
- DJ feeds it some of the less savoury pieces of bat meat while Barrett sneaks in behind it. There’s evidence of human meat stuffed into nooks and crannies - someone’s been feeding the bear - and there’s some loose change scattered across the floor amongst the remains. Further in, cave paintings show the bear and the Gads sitting peacefully together.
- Dawn is here, and it’s already gearing up to be a scorcher. The party leaves the cave and jogs towards the next cave along the stream before the Gads emerge. Across the valley, Jasmine hears some echolocating clicks pinging off the cave walls beside her. She sends a Message to Andromeda telling her she’s bugging out, then leaves towards the Prepper enclave.


--- Non-Euclidean Madness
- The others reach the next cave and find it flanked with strange non-euclidean pillars. From one angle they are straight oblongs, but as you move they become curved and threatening. Proper dungeon stuff. Cold wind blows from the entrance with an ominous moan.



- They enter, Andromeda with a lantern on her hip, and walk into a triangular room. As they move in, the far wall stretches out to form a square with a single lidless eye drawn upon it. The pupil of the eye is the Duvan’Ku symbol, and the lensing effect means it always seems to be facing you directly. Reach out to touch it and it’s always too far away to touch.
- Two corridors branch out to the sides. One contains pale light moving strangely, from the other comes a constant breeze. They pick the route with the dancing wisps.
- Snels leaves the bat monster’s head at the entrance to warn the Elves away… but Barrett countermands that by sneaking over and putting it near the cold corridor. While at the entrance he sees that Gads are swarming around the dead bat monster’s lair. Good thing they left!
- The party heads into the deceptively deep corridor. It stretches strangely, and the light from Andromeda’s lantern becomes dim and flickery as though it’s underwater. The entrance is far far behind them, and going backwards only makes it retreat further away. They are stuck here, perhaps.
- The dancing lights resolve into distant eyes of dark bulbous creatures way way away. They wave long arms that stretch for miles. Dustin Johnson decides that this trippy perceptual shit is not for him and lights up a blunt.


--- Extra-Perceptual Combat!
- The creatures attack the spark! Their long arms reach through the cosmic distance and scrabble at his armour, distorting the links into the distance but failing to scratch his flesh. Their claws are as big as worlds, small as lice.
- The Otherpot kicks in and DJ finds himself in a circular room, the corridor back is a hole in the floor, the creatures are fairly lame flailing things on the walls that can’t reach him from where they are. His compatriots are repeated around him, but he’s fine.
- Barrett grabs the doobie and puts it to his mouth. He sees things as they truly are in the next dimension of perception. Red arrives, somehow, shrieking something in Yetiese. The creatures tear her friend Gatsby apart and he swirls in a temporal tornado into some other place. Red tries to save him to no avail, the fourth dimension is the domain of her feared father.



- Damnation Snels steps sideways… and finds himself facing an unholy obelisk of rippling black sludge. It stretches into a cylinder that reaches upwards forever. On the face of the cenotaph is a rectangular inset that kaleidoscopes into other shapes. In the centre of the inset is a hand-shaped hole.
- The dutchie is passed to the left-hand side and the party’s perception changes one-by-one to the circular room. The last to smoke up is Andromeda, who has spent several rounds parrying more and more attacks from the flailing baddies. She screams for the fucking toke, and her vision clears to reveal the room’s true higher-dimensional form.
- Papa Snels sees Gatsby being sucked into the cenotaph, swirling round and into the peak of the obelisk, screaming. Some other-dimensional prophetic sense seizes him, and he falls to his knees with a new truth blasting into his mind - his sons were right! He abandons his belief in the truth of POWERLAD and gives himself to the Snelsman faith.
- As the rest of the party shoot the flailing monsters one by one, Damnation Snels reaches into the hand-hole in the cenotaph. He feels a hand gripping his own, the warm familiar hand of his long-dead wife. He knows he could go through and join her… but instead he pulls.





--- Euclidean Sanity
- The cenotaph, the walls, the unreal perspective, everything is drawn up and out and into the object he grips in his hand. Reality warping and shifting and coming down into a single locus - the broken-off hand and arm of Damnation’s wife. It feels warm but motionless, and when he tries to look inside the break it’s all-encompassing vantablack.
- Damnation Snels is standing in the centre of a dull square room, holding the hand of his wife. It even has her wedding band. The corridor out is short and uninteresting. The eye on the wall in the entrance chamber is mere paint.
- They go through the entrance chamber and investigate the other corridor, finding a bare room with a small model of an obelisk on it. There’s a tiny model of Snels’ wife lying there, sans hand. It’s warm to the touch. On the ceiling is the bottom of a spiral stairway.
- They stand on each others’ shoulders to reach it, and discover that a sharp pull is enough to make the whole thing corkscrew down from above. It’s a stairway upwards!


--- Elsewhere: Jasmine Meets the Preppers
- Jasmine is carrying Sophia’s heartless body home. She passes the prepper enclave on the way to the Saviourbone Mine. She asks about for a cart to help carry her friend home, and an angry man trailed by an older woman stalks towards her.
- It seems that the lady Snels seduced has blamed her infidelity on the child Sophia. At least the husband is buying it! Jasmine puts them both on “the list” and trudges onwards.


--- Dungeon: Onwards into the Dark
- After a bit of stair climbing, the party emerges into a nexus of corridors. The sound of Gads chittering and clicking echoes throughout from no particular direction. After climbing a spiral staircase for a while it’s hard to know which way is which.
- They pick a direction and follow it along, finding a half-door to the left. It’s like a horse stall with no upper door, and the hinges of the door are rusty. Inside the room are overturned tables and smashed alchemical equipment. Cool! Only issue is that the sound of the Gads has subsided, and the dungeon is deathly quiet…


- Barrett spots some books on a shelf and decides he just has to have them right now! He leaps over the rusty half-door and makes a real racket. The hinges screech and the door smacks against the jamb. The sound of alarmed Gads chattering starts up immediately!
- The rest of the party piles into the room! There’s another half-door at the other end of the smashed lab, and beyond it is some sort of half-finished henge-style summoning circle. Unused slabs are leaning against the walls.
- Barrett scrabbles for the books then scurries off to hide. DJ roots around in the shattered glassware, finding colourful vials of liquid, then kicks over some tables and splashes oil everywhere. Andromeda finds a full-size door in a little annex and leans a henge slab against it in case something’s going to burst out of there. Damnation Snels, no longer fine with skeletons due to his sudden epiphany, kicks his loader-skeleton out into the corridor to distract whatever’s coming.

--- Gad Attack!
- There’s a building doppler effect as something tears down the corridor, and Damnation’s loader-skeleton is suddenly shattered into bone as it screeches past! The party, hiding behind the half-door on the other side of the lab, take aim and hold their nerve.
- Creepy heads poke out around the opposite door - Gads! But these are stranger than before. Their baleen goes all the way down their neck, they have a fan of quills on their head, and their eyes are a black ring around their head. Their baleen stretches… they’re charging a spell!


- With the Elves in heavy cover, and the party facing down a barrage of cover-ignoring magic missiles, the situation seems dire. Then somehow, impossibly, a skeletal horse barges in! It’s Barrett’s horse he’d had “moored” nearby! Must be residual non-euclidean effects!


- It charges past the Gads but somehow fails to disrupt them, and the Clerics charge forward! You don’t get cover against melee! They fall upon one of the Gads, smashing it with hammers and forcing it backwards - though the spell continues to charge.
- Barrett follows in their wake, shortsword drawn. He leaps over the Clerics’ backs and stabs straight through the head of the Gad! It crumples to the ground!
- Damnation Snels continues the momentum, skidding round the corner with his musket drawn… and takes a Magic Missile to the head! His breather-mask takes the brunt of the damage and he stumbles into the wall.
- The Gad suddenly spreads its wings wide and is gone, a gust of wind left in its wake. There is a doppler-effect shriek… and we leave it on a cliffhanger.
Total: 2450 exp


Team Bonus:
- Antagonist Appeaser bonus
- Balls to the Wall bonus
- Brutal Kill bonus
- Coitus boners
- Classic Charles bonus
- Freudian bonus
- Headtaker bonus
- Heresy bonus
- High as Fuck bonus
- Holy bonus
- Leave a Man Behind bonus
- Ludicrous Gore bonus
- Masterchef bonus
- Next to Godliness bonus
- PETA bonus
- Pundemonium bonus
- Shunga bonus
- Split the Party bonus
- Tactical Fighting bonus
- Trapsetter bonus
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong bonus
- Why Did You Eat That bonus
Total: 1150 exp


Individual Bonus:
- Chronicler (Carter / Jasmine - 100 exp)
- Expedition Leader (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Cartographer (Carter / Jasmine - 100 exp)
- Paymaster (Charles / DJ - 100 exp)
- Quartermaster (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Vanguard (Tom / Barrett - 100 exp)
- Triage (Carter / Jasmine - 100 exp)
- Chef (George / Damnation Snels - 100 exp)
- Art Attack bonus (Carter, George, Tom, Charles - 100 exp ea.)
- Artapalooza bonus (Carter, Charles - 100 exp)
- Chippo Champion bonus (Carter*2 - 100 exp ea.)
- JÜGBRINGYR bonus (Kitty, Tom, Charles - 500 exp ea.)

Death Toll:
- Ephraim Gatsby, Red's soulless best friend, sucked into higher dimensions.

Experience Totals:
- Charles / Dustin “DJ” Johnson, Level 4 Intergalacticist Cleric: 9258 (Level up at 14000)
- Kitty / Andromeda, Level 4 Laddite Cleric: 8258 (Level up at 14000) Level up: +1d6 HP! +1 Healing Pool! +1 Starting Faith! +Backstory!- George / Praise-God-For-He-Gave-His-Only-Son-So-That-We-Might-Be-Saved-From-Damnation Snels, Level 3 Laddite Cleric: 6458 (Level up at 7000) - Timothy / Red, Level 3 Fighter: 6158 (Level up at 8000)
- Carter / Jasmine, Level 2 Elf (Flibbertigibbet): 3017 (Level up at 4500) Level up: +1d6 HP! +1 Mana! +1 Free Spell! +Backstory!
- Tom / Privateer Barrett, Level 2 Specialist: 1561 (Level up at 3000)
Level up: +1d6 HP! +2 Skill Points! +Backstory!

Wednesday 24 April 2019

Retrospective 22 - And We're Back!

It's only been five sessions since the last Retrospective and it already feels like a lot has happened!
Buckle up, I've got a lot of thoughts.


Cold Winter:

We bridged the thirteen-year gap between the End War and the start of the post-apocalypse with a minigame - the lengthily named Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Of This Cold Winter.
Reskinned from a harrowing winter season to a harrowing decade or so of apocalypse survival, it worked really well!
I'll say a little more in the mini-review at the end, but it was very good. Lots of nail-biting decision making, visible despair, and whoops of triumph when something went right for once.
The surviving groups made up the demographics of the final town, which was good groundwork for me to build off.


Quick off the Mark:

My visions of a few sessions of scrabbling for cash in the post-apocalypse were quickly overruled by a hell of a good first session back!
A rumour of treasure and a little exploration led them to a buried prepper cache, full of riches and ripe for the taking!
Loaded up with guns and valuables, they were soon able to equip themselves in a manner befitting explorers of a dangerous new land. Probably for the best, really.

One of my favourite things to happen was the rise of the loader-porter skeleton. It was quickly discovered that Encumbrance is super important in the exploration stakes, so Andromeda purchased herself a skeleton that would follow her around, carry her stuff, and reload her muskets for her.
Others soon followed suit. Great fun!


The First Death:

Alas, Sophia.

Carter had such plans for her, and they were all dashed in a single string of foolish mistakes.
They investigated rumours of mysterious flying creatures, which the party quickly insisted were "seagulls". On discovering that they were flying Elves, Sophia decided to climb down into their protected gorge and start yelling insults at them so that they'd attack her.
It was a complete success... and Sophia's corpse tumbled into the ravine riddled with Magic Missile fire.

Sophia was, of course, a holdover from the pre-apocalypse. An unaging Elf-child who kept making veiled hints that she was the child of POWERLAD and one of his lovers. We never did find out the truth of that.
Her designs on abusing the Summon spell to call forth meaty demons live on in Carter's next character, who at time of writing has devoured a couple of Elf hearts and has the Wild Hunt coming for her, whatever that means. That can't be good.





Clerics:

Dear Lord my new Cleric rules have been getting a workout! I'm really happy with them.
Clerics feel very powerful and it's been fun to see people grapple with and play into their gods' strictures.
Notable mighty feats include the time when two POWERLAD Clerics created overlapping lightning barriers to nuke a bunch of skeletons, and when the UFO Cleric used his Abduct ability to completely neuter an otherwise incredibly dangerous burrowing beast.





Theme Change:

After the crazy-epic apocalyptic showdown of the finale, it would feel a bit weird to me to just start over at first level and do the same old thing in a very different world.
The world is vastly changed, it's practically a new campaign, and so my goal was to change the theme enough to make it feel different.

Maybe eventually society will recover enough for us to go back to classic town-and-dungeon gameplay, but for now it's a hardscrabble fight for survival in a hostile world cloaked in poison.
As of right now, I'm happy with how it's going!


Scale:

One of the biggest differences is scale. I've divided every six-mile hex into one-mile sub-hexes, and so they've spent the last 5 sessions tooling around in a single six-mile hex.
Previously they were flying across a bunch of six-mile hexes in a single day, now they're struggling through a hostile landscape where the best they can manage is about twelve miles a day.
The world feels much bigger as a result - getting back to Dwimmermount will take them weeks, rather than days, if they ever make it there at all.


Weather:

My justification for this relative slowness is the toxic atmosphere.
Even on a clear day inside the protective Storm Shell you're breathing in noxious fumes, and in the usual hazy weather you quickly become exhausted.

To this end, I'm leaning heavily on a Weather system based on this one.
Basically weather changes at least twice a day - morning and evening - and potentially more often with Encounter rolls.
For the most part, weather is shit. It's exhausting, or equipment-eating, or painful, or straight up deadly.
I've got different weather charts for different Seasons which should be fun! Changeable bastard weather in Spring, long clear days and cloying heat in Summer, endless rains in Autumn, and swirling blizzards in Winter while the poison freezes into the soil.

There are different effects per Weather type, with more severe effects if you're not wearing protective gear.
The players are currently protected from the worst of the elements by the Storm-Shell, a vast shield of energy created by POWERLAD when he saved the town, so it's relatively safe to walk around without protective gear on.
If and when they eventually leave the Shell it'll be a different story.


Like legit check it out


Hexcrawl Procedure:

Having a much more detailed/procedural hexcrawl mechanic is the other key way that the post-apoc campaign feels different to what we had before.

Every day is divided into Watches, basically the hexcrawl equivalent of dungeon Turns.
Each Watch is 4 hours long, with specific things that you can do in each Watch like Travel, Explore, or Forage.

This makes each day more granular, and allows for various mechanical effects like gaining encumbering Exhaustion as you travel through Hazy weather.


New laminated sheets are of course needed as a result



Timescale and Expeditions:

I want the players be able to experience and steer humanity's recovery across the face of the poisoned Earth, which necessitates a real acceleration of the game's timeline.

Consider: It was about half a year in-game between the beginning of the apocalypse and the end of the world.
That took over two years of weekly session in real-time.
At that rate it'll be real life decades before the players see humanity start to recover!

So I'm flipping it on its head.
My goal is to have a month go past every session on average. This means the seasons can change, and we can have a "Rebuild Phase" every three months where players get to orchestrate the rebuild of the world.

To this end, every month players choose whether they're organising an Expedition or taking Downtime.
Expeditions take up a whole month, no matter how long you actually spend out in the wastes. The remaining time is presumed to be spent on organising the Expedition beforehand and recovering from the poisonous miasma afterwards.
Downtime is the other option, and includes all the classics like Carousing and Spell Research.
The idea is that Expeditions might stretch over a few sessions (like if it's an Expedition to a dungeon), but we'll make the time back with comparatively speedy Downtime months.

Hopefully I'll have more on the Rebuild Phase when we've had more time to try out the mechanics.


Mapping:

A last note on Mapping.
Since the world is trackless and uncharted and fundamentally changed from its pre-apocalyptic state, mapping the world is suddenly important again!

A fun part (as I said before) is that it's the same world the players have been inhabiting for years.
They can use the old maps to find where towns used to be, but they can't be sure of what's out there.

I've been a bit flip-floppy on how obvious I want the hexes to be.
Currently my ideal is that it's fairly naturalistic, less "let's explore this hex" and more "let's explore around this area".
The struggle is, of course, that the map is fundamentally hex-based. I might have highfalutin ideas about the players drawing freehand maps that are completely functional but fundamentally inaccurate, but hexes are the bones of the world.
To be fair we're already getting functional and pretty accurate maps so maybe I can't complain just yet!


Best so far as of time of writing!




Mini-Reviews


An absolute fucking banger.
It's a minigame originally intended to save a small village from a long cold winter, as the name implies.
I changed no mechanics and just scaled everything up, changing Fuel to Filter-Plants and rewriting the Occurrences to be on a year-by-year scale.
I didn't realise before we started, but there's an intrinsic self-balancing effect to losing people in this game. The more people die, the easier it is to feed and heal them. By the end they'd lost a ton of people, but the remainder had more than enough supplies to see them out to the end of the game.

Honestly amazing. 5/5 gnawed corpses.