Post-Game Report: Tooth and Claw

This past Sunday, after a bit of a hiatus, we continued our Warriors & Warlock campaign, using a freely-adapted version of Paizo's Children of the Void in the Second Darkness adventure path. Our regular cast:

Brother Gannon - Good with knives.  Wishes he had more poison.
Renin - Uses his brains...to fry yours.
Zarac - Hopes you've got gold in your teeth.

Left on the dilapadated docks on the island of Devil's Elbow, our heroes had four days to find a haul of skymetal and return back here to meet Djosspur Kray, and his vessel The Flying Cloud, for their trip back to Raedelsport.  Also, there was the question of what sort of creature had decimated the dwarvish contingent, and what became of all the mages from the Esoteric Order of Cryptographers.  Since it was already dusk, the party checked out the old buildings around the dock.  Finding one of them in reasonably good condition, and free of any dangers, they made camp for the night.

The module has a robust wandering monster table, but I had inadvertently left the notebook wherein I had done the Pathfinder to Warriors & Warlocks conversion of the monsters at home.  I had to improvise.

The next morning, the group leaves the docks and heads up the step trail to the failed and abandoned settlement of Witchlight.  Wandering monster time!

Luckily (for me, perhaps not the players), the Warriors & Warlocks book provide me with some ready to use monster stats.  The party soon finds they're being followed by three utahraptors...

...One of which is shown here in silhouette with a man, Renin probably.  That's just the pose they were in right before the thing took a bite out of him.

Anyway, the raptors are upon them--all hissing, feathers, and wicked talons.  Unlucky rolls insure they hit the party hard, and all three are wounded before they hit the beasts.  By the end of the fight, all of the party have been stunned at least once, and Gannon has been disabled.  Most of the damage against the raptors comes courteousy of Renin's brain-frying mental blasts, but Gannon gets hits in, and Zarac rallies at the end to kill two of them with one mighty blow, utilizing a nifty feat.

The party spent the next couple of in-game hours trying to get enough good healing rolls to go on--and giving Gannon a couple of doses of the healing potions they had had the foresight to purchase before beginning the venture.

Limping on up toward the settlement of Witchlight, the party sees vultures circling ominously overhead, and a light flashing peridiodically high in one of the still-standing towers...

Post-Game Report: A Sea of Troubles

This past Sunday, we continued our Warriors & Warlock campaign, using a freely-adapted version of Paizo's Children of the Void in the Second Darkness adventure path. Our regular cast:

Brother Gannon - Is he thief, monk--or both?
Renin - Mind-mage out to save the world who hates and fears him. Or something.
Zarac - He loves only gold...but he really likes his sword.

Things looked bleak for our heroes and their attempt to get in on the "skymetal rush" on Devil's Elbow Island after the fall of a star--and a resultant tsunami that wrecked Raedelsport's harbor. Luckily, a merchant-speculator, Tavrem Kalus, had come to their aid with an offer of passage on the only ship available--for a forty percent cut of the profits, naturally.

The party had dinner with Captain Djosspur Kray aboard his vessel, the Flying Cloud. Mainly, this was a chance for the Captain to grill the three on what their objectives on the Devil's Elbow were, and to deliver some exposition about the island's curse! Said curse involved a siren named Ysersei, and made its dread presence felt in the form of Brother Gannon's player's inability to pronounce the siren's name, even with the other players' couching.

The dinner was interrupted by the sound and smells of burning. Rushing up to the deck, they found black-clad saboteurs setting fire to the sails. Gannon dispatched one with a quickly thrown dagger. Renin mind-blasted one from the mast. Zarac rolled too low on initiative to do aught but shout encouragement.

Despite their style of dress, the saboteurs were no ninja. More like non-ja. They beat a haste retreat over the side of the ship. Quick thinking Renin telekinetically dipped a barrel in the ocean and used it to douse the sails. Gannon and Zarac apprehended the two fallen saboteurs--who were unconscious and didn't really put up a fight.

The Captain set his crew to repairing the sails, and gave the party leave to conduct the interrogations as they saw fit. Two captives meant two interrogations. Renin proceeded with mind-reading his captive. Zarac and Gannon planned to resort to "harsh interrogation techniques," but finding the W&W rules required a full day for really good torture, they decide just to Intimidate.

The two saboteurs sang the same song: the party's old nemesis, now supposed business partner, crime boss Clegg Haddo hired them to make sure no other ships got out of the harbor. The party at first takes this as a personal attack, but later decided it was just Haddo hedging his bets against everybody. As thanks for the information, the saboteurs get thrown overboard still tied.

The repairs were completed by dawn, and the Flying Cloud crossed the eighteen miles to the Devil's Elbow. The closer they got, the more nervous Captain Kray was. He found a good reason to be--as soon as they docked, they were approached by a ragged group coming out of the forest, asking passage back to Raedelsport. These few were all that's left of the mixed human and dwarven mercenaries hired by the Lord Mayor of Raedelsport to get the skymetal. The leader of the expedition, Urumdarru Goldhammer, told a story of strange, deadly creatures lurking in the forest, who passed on a horrifying contagion to men they killed.

Kray is ready to go now, for sure, but promises to pick the party back up in three days time. The three adventurers are left on the docks with the sea to their backs, and the foreboding forest in front of them.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Post-Game Report: After the Wave

Uncertainty in the wake of a tsunami. The vague feeling persists that the party has missed something (and they have). When in doubt, seek out Magical Orders for answers. Renin’s prophetic dream is better appreciated post-disaster. Riches fallen from the sky are on everyone’s mind—but how to get to them? A ship is needed, but in a devastated port, none are available. Old enemies in the criminal underworld are approached, and agreements struck, but sea transport isn’t one of them. A detour to haggle with a magic-monger proves fruitful. On the other hand, smuggler kingpins are busy men and difficult to contact through strangely-accented intermediaries. A chance encounter offers a ship for hire within the week, and reveals the troubling history of the destination.

Sunday's installment of our Warriors & Warlocks campaign, freely adapted from Paizo's The Second Darkness, featured the usual cast: Zarac the acquisitive veteran, Renin the psionicist with the troubling dream, and Brother Gannon the thief in monk's clothes.  Apearances were made by the half-elf mage Samyrantha Bel-Tanis, their friend in the Esoteric Order of the Cryptograhers, and their enemy, crime boss Clegg Haddo, who's now their business partner in the gambling house they "inherited."  The party's new employer was introduced: merchant speculator Tavrem Kalus.

This session revealed one of the problems inherent in the the whole "adventure path" thing. The player's missed out on a major story reveal at the end of the first module, which was no big deal there--advice was even give on how to handle that--but module two begins with assumption that the player's got all the pertinent information from the last one, and offers no alternatives. It wasn't terribly difficult to work around--after all, the total of modules I've gamemastered in my whole career being somewhere short of ten, I'm used to making stuff up--but it seems an oversight.

So left in the limbo between the official end of the last module, and the vague beginnings of this one, the player's got a little time in the "sandbox" of the city of Raedelsport, which I worried might bore them, but apparently didn't.

Despite the over a month gap since we last gamed, the player's are actually beginning to remember stuff about the city's locations and personalities (or at least getting better at remembering where to find them in their notes). Everyone seems to be having a good time, though the two more novice players (one of them just started playing with this campaign) are a little tentative at times.

And we've finally arrived at a system to ensure the economic burden of the traditional game pizza order is shared fair and equitably by habitual cash carriers and non-carriers alike, so there's that.

Post-Game Report: What Lurks Below

Last Sunday, we continued our Warriors & Warlock campaign, using a somewhat re-imagined version of Paizo's Shadow in the Sky in the Second Darkness adventure path.  The characters were, as before: Zarac the fighter, Renin the psionicist, and Gannon, the thief-monk.

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they had just finished a pitch battle with a group of thieves and thugs hired to ambush them, by their (previously) trusted employer, Saltus, at the Grinning Goblin Gambling House. When their employer slipped into some secret tunnels, the players encountered their first dilemma of the evening--whether to loot the gambling house or give chase.

They did a little of both, allowing Saltus to make good his escape into a cave system ("smuggler's tunnels") beneath the gambling house. After delivering the coup de grace to a psionically stunned boar (the pet of Saltus' right-hand lackey), they quickly determined that none of them were particularly skilled at lock-picking, and so it fell to the psionicist to crush the locked trapdoor with his mental powers.

By then, their desire to get revenge on Saltus was beginning to pick up. It allowed them to avoid arousing Zarac's usually ever-present avarice, which would no doubt have led them to a submerged pirate treasure--but all a vengeful wight. Instead, they chose a different branch and wound up activating magical stalactites which served as a sort of cave security system for a den of troglodytes. These guys had their gambling interrupted:

So throwing down their "simple but inane" (according to the module) game, they came running for the party. The dice were fickle for the trogs. They kept getting natural "twenties" and equally natural "ones"--making them alternate between shrugging off the PCs best blows, and crumpling like paper. One troglodyte went down before they're even in melee range, felled by Renin's mind-bullets.

The other three didn't fall so easy. Zarac (already injured from the battle above ground) and Renin took wounds before they dispatched their foes. Each of the player's put down one trog, and Zarac delivered a killing stroke to the one previously blasted into unconsciousness by Renin.

So far so good--except the sounds of battle had alerted the other trogs, and the remaining adult males of the den came running. The PCs quickly assessed the odds, and made a strategic retreat. They climbed back up to the basement of the gambling hall, then removed the ladders, so the troglodytes couldn't follow.  They had by then recognized the odd smell they had noted in the basement earlier as a lingering sign of troglodyte presence, and weren't eager to have such visitations repeated.

They assumed that Saltus must have escaped. Again they returned to searching the various rooms of gambling house for valuables, or something that might explain his betrayal.

They'd forgotten something.

They forgot the elven ranger that lent them a hand last adventure, and the warning he gave of a renegade elf, apparently working with Saltus, at some unknown purpose. They forgot, and gave their hidden adversary, warned by her troglodyte minions, time to escape.

While they broke into the gambling hall's strangely sparsely funded vault, the weird shadow in the sky that had previously been of much interest, disappeared. While they sat at a bar, trying to figure out how to sell the business they now found themselves in possession of--and who to sell it to--a falling star streaked across the night sky. It slammed into a small island just beyond the harbor, leading to a earthquake and a tsunami.

These natural disasters had been foreshadowed by the dream that had brought Renin to Raedelsport. A dream the PCs had spent parts of several sessions trying to find someone to interpret. The looks on the players' faces when realization dawned was priceless.

The session ended with the characters looking out over the chaos in the city from the second floor of the Grinning Goblin, wondering just what might happen next.

Something I found interesting about the module was that it had a timeline of events that played out on their on. The players were able to interact with them, but they didn't require the PCs to be railroaded into doing so--were free to pursue their own agenda, and often did. While definitely a scenario with a plot (at least in the background), rather than a sandbox, I found it to have a lighter touch than other "story-centric" modules I've played in the past.

The conversion to Warriors & Warlocks has taken some extra work. Luckily, a large numbers of D&D monsters have been statted in Mutants & Masterminds terms on The Atomic Think Tank Message Boards. The three week breaks between sessions should have helped--and I suppose they did, in terms of providing more time to procrastinate.

The long between game intervals probably also led to player's forgetting some important details. From my perspective, this didn't impair the adventure in anyway, though the players felt the lack at times. Since they were relying on notes anyway, that just means they need to take better ones.

Overall, I think a good time was had by all.

In about a month, we undertake Chapter 2: Children of the Void.

Post-Game Report: A Weird Shadow Over Raedelsport

Last night we met for the fourth session of our D&D inspired Warriors & Warlocks game.  Despite, the desire to get "back to the dungeon" so to speak, these first few sessions have been mostly city adventures.  I've found the conversion suggestions from Greywulf very helpful in porting things over from 3e to the M&M system, as I've been using as the backbone of the campaign Paizo's Pathfinder: Second Darkness adventure path.   Despite some wariness about "adventure paths" in general (dating back to Dragonlance), there were some of elements of that storyline that I found really interesting and worth using in a modified way in my own campaign world. 

This setting is the latest iteration of the world I've used for most of my fantasy gaming since late middle school.  Currently, it centers around an Australia-sized island continent called Arn.  Arn is now the frontier for the nations of the large, Eurasian-like landmass to its east, but in previous ages it was center of various now-fallen civilizations--including the enigmatic "Dungeon Builders" who left Arn riddled with their labyrinthine, subterranean ruins, so attractive to adventurers.  Arn is the site of several city-states founded by the Old Thystaran Empire, amongst hostile, barbarian tribes, and nonhuman enclaves.  The greatest of these is Terminus, named so because it was founded on the site of the farthest boundary marker of Thystarus at a landing on the River Fflish. 

But Terminus isn't where the player's currently find themselves.  Instead, they're on Arn's northwest coast, in the narrow streets of the mist-choked, pirate haven of Raedelsport.  As supplied by The Second Darkness, the city is currently beset by strange happenings related to an omnious, inky-black cloud which hangs, unmoving, overhead.  After various interactions with the criminal underworld of Raedelsport, its finally time to move beyond the city and find out the secret of the eldritch cloud.

So that's the set-up.  Here's the cast of player characters:

• Zarac: A veteran sellsword from the eastern Arn, troubled by an acquisitve nature and a current surfeit of funds after the untimely death of his last employer.
• Gannon: A monk and thief from an abbey in the Eiglophian Mountains (yes, a lot of pulp fiction name borrowings here) to the north.  He's a servant of a obscure minor goddess, Mother Scythe, the Lady of Reaping, whose exoteric teachings focus on self-reliance and stoicism, but whose inner mysteries promote fleecing the less wary.  He's been sent on a mission for his goddess.
• Renin: A wanderer from distant Staark (think Prussia under the Teutonic Knights, mixed with a pinch of ancient Sparta, and a smidge of various millenialist heretical sects in the Middle Ages), with rare powers of the mind (psionics, to use the D&D-ism), drawn to Raedelsport by mysterious dreams.  

Like all good characters, they get me thinking about hooks in their backstories.  For instance, I hadn't really given much thought to the inclusion of psionics until Eric proposed his character.  Now I'm thinking about where the other psionicists might be hiding, and that leads me to think about Beneath the Planet of the Apes...But I digress.

Play of first module has seen the basic outline and set peices remain largely intact (in a Yojimbo to Fist Full of Dollars sort of way), with changes to NPC presentation and motivation, and some player driven digressions along the way.  I hear some later chapters get more railroady, so I'm fully prepared to jettison some of them entirely in favor of crafting our own version of the overarching "plot."

Anyway, so far, so good.