Session 68: Here Come the Mummies

 Session 68: Here Come the Mummies

4/21/24-4/27/24, rest 4/28, active 4/29

PC: Valda, Zektel, Brumdor, Cracaryn

Hench: Arif, Zero, Taco

#ACKS

Team B made it back to Northbridge through Abstract Wilderness travel since the session last week ran late. Bigtoe’s representative who rescued them with the flat-bed truck failed to succumb to Brumdor’s negotiation and stuck firm at a 50/50 split of goods. She left with the items headed back to the Friendship Hills and the party stayed on to continue pursuing treasure maps.

Their travel to the first map location was annoyingly profitable, having great luck finding buried treasure and ore deposits and such. They even found and stole a fairy conclave’s mushroom ring that could double for iron rations.

Eventually they arrived at their destination, which turned out to be a small family cemetery with a mausoleum at one end. The cast-iron fence and gate was in surprisingly good condition but the rest of the place was pretty weathered.

Taco the thief was able to decipher some of the old script, dating the graves to 500-600 years ago. He also was concerned about mummies being nearby, so the group systematically desecrated the dozen or so graves in the yard, digging them up, stabbing the long-dead inhabitants, and then burning the remains in the holes. This took them like a day and a half but no random encounters interfered. They learned many of the bodies were buried alive by the claw marks along the inside of the coffin lids.

The heavy stone door of the mausoleum pushed in to reveal a small interior with eight slots for bodies. These were occupied by slightly better condition but still poorly mummified corpses that the party again desecrated immediately. No respect for the dead, I tell ya.

A massive tome bound in stone tablets and latched closed sat on a lectern at the far side of the mausoleum. Brumdor believed it to be mechanically trapped or something, so they devised a plan using rope, a horse, and Cracaryn to grab the book and get pulled away. Unfortunately, his neck didn’t break and they acquired the super heavy tome, stowing it on one of their pack horses. The lectern itself rose and slid to the side, revealing a crypt space beneath past a narrow cast-iron spiral stair.

Descending into the crypt below, the group found sarcophagi standing against each wall and double doors with a rising/setting sun motif decorating it. Painstakingly detailed precautions were taken to wrap each coffin in rope before opening them one by one. This revealed better preserved bodies with some grave goods inside. The only complication during this process was that some of the bodies were infested with murder maggots that sprung out at Valda and Cracaryn as they opened the lids. Good saves and a quick response from Zektel of Doctors without Orders rendered the potentially deadly situation trivial.

Through the double doors they found very finely crafted sarcophagi lining each wall of the next chamber, with a raised dais covered in treasure at the far end. Again they prepared to tackle the situation as methodically and safely as possible. They buffed up with magic and laid out a plan, then entered to execute it. Unfortunately, they tripped the trigger to awaken the inhabitants before they could apply any of their mummy-dampening measures.

Eight of the linen-wrapped undead sprang from the coffins and the fight was on. They’ve got a nasty fear effect on first contact but only one PC failed their save, so the group was able to bottle up at the entrance and slug it out. It took a long time, but Brumdor’s big AC kept those with spears able to attack safely from the second rank. Eventually the party destroyed all the creatures and looted the place, but the session was an hour over so it’ll be another Abstracted run to a town.

Musings:

I find lairs easier to improvise during session. I can envision them in their total theme easier than I can a dungeon, particularly one that’s being generated live. Makes sense since it’s a smaller situation.

I did better with the random encounters during travel. Updated my cheat sheet and practice practice practice.

A PC focused on Healing is a literal lifesaver. Doctors without Orders coming in clutch again vs. Mummy Rot.

I wonder what’s in the book?

Session 67: AD&D DMG 111

4/7/24-4/18/24, rest 4/19, active 4/20

PC: Valda, Zektel, Brumdor, Cracaryn

Hench: Elizabete, Arif, Zero, Taco

#ACKS

Team A was in time jail this week, so the crew ran with Team B. They were a little nervous about wanted posters that may or may not have accurate physical descriptions of them being circulated around the region’s capital. This led them to stay far from that area and pursue adventure somewhere out west.

En route to Teutch Tower, they murdered some highwaymen who foolishly thought that 3 to 1 odds meant certain victory. Zektel the shaman harvested their hearts and stuffed them into his metamphora. No one in the party seemed to mind. Unfortunately Teutch’s contact in the Friendship Hills refused to buy them.

The party rode Bigtoe’s new train contraption from Teutch Tower to Carnotkhan, pronounced “Car-NOT-can” I’m pretty sure, to take on some treasure maps from the dwarven machinist. They met with some member of Bigtoe’s middle management team and secured the maps. Teutch also had a mission to collect Treeherder parts but the team lacked the skills to harvest them.

A hired barge got them upriver a bit faster than they could have walked. There were some interesting results on the ACKS II terrain encounter tables but the party was focused on their mission and passed them by.

The first map led to a swampy area with some strange plants growing in it. The two nature dudes put their heads together and identified it as a potent poisonous plant called curare. While harvesting it they discovered a rusty, buried chain leading off into the distance. They followed it to a trap door and a small crawl space.

The tunnel beyond had to be crawled through and the whole bunch went in except for a few henchmen to watch the horses. The thieves in the lead dropped the ball pretty bad on finding traps, taking a falling rock trap to the face but surviving and dropping Cracaryn into a hidden pit trap that nearly killed the elf. Brumdor crawled across a poisoned needle but it broke on his armor.

A small chamber about head height was at the end of the crawl, letting them stand and stretch a little. There was a big pile of treasure there, which we rolled based on the approximate value of the map compared to the closest average value on the loot table. They whiffed pretty bad on liquid treasure but got some magic items and crawled back out.

Travel to the next map location was interesting. There was a spontaneous geyser that blasted Cracaryn and his hench Elizabete, killing their mounts and also the hench. They buried her in the wilderness and Cracaryn the Elf carried on by foot. There was also a Temple of Doom style golden idol on a small pedestal in the middle of a field that Brumdor the dwarf was able to snatch.

When they arrived at their next target hex, they found a small shrine with a bowl. Zektel put a human heart from his metamphora in the bowl and it opened a secret chamber that revealed tons of strange stones shaped like eyes and long flat pieces of… something. The shaman was able to identify them as the equivalent of Doppleganger parts used for spell research, but they were covered in a viscous slime and weighed a lot. There was no way the group could move it all with just horses.

Zektel used an aerial messenger spell and sent a sparrow or something to Bigtoe with a short sitrep and request of a pickup by the machinist’s big flatbed truck. To reduce random encounters, the party just stayed put instead of searching for the treasure map “X”. A minor plague infected the camp but was easily taken care of by the founding member of Doctors without Orders and their exfil arrived, some troops with a flatbed truck under the command of one of Bigtoe’s henchmen.

Session time was running long so I got a target destination for them and will finish their travel back using Abstract Wilderness Encounter rules when the time comes.

Musings:

The ACKS II encounter charts for travel are really interesting, but they’re a little cumbersome to use in practice. It didn’t help that I rolled unique things way more frequently than statistically likely that required more cross-referencing of rules. Practice and book mastery will help there. Maybe a cheat sheet for all the charts in one place. Maybe the updated formatting for the PDFs will help, too. We’ll find out.

It’s becoming a pattern that one player’s domain level PCs bail the party out of tough or inconvenient situations. There was a very small chance that I was going to allow Bigtoe to rescue the group with his truck for something that wasn’t even his hook and I made them roll it in the open. It went their way so it is what it is, but going forward I’m going to be much more strict on gimmes from on high. It flattens gameplay to boring levels of only chasing low-hanging fruit with minimal risk. Experimentation with the dynamic nature of this game style reveals things like this. The game’s grown a lot in the ~2 years we’ve been running it and it will continue to do so by adjusting when we need to.

Session 66: Raggedy Hobos

3/24/24-4/7/24, rest 4/8, active 4/9

PC: Gwendolyn, Aldric, Bebe

Hench: Amadayo, Madrof, Mahin

#ACKS

Gwendolyn the Goat (Bard) was approached in downtime about creating and performing songs based on locomotives for the domain level player Bigtoe. The Machinist had created a train system and wanted to sell it to the lords of the realm. He needed hype and was paying well for it.

The group decided that they would escort Gwendolyn on this quest. She had spent the last few days retrofitting classic train-themed songs with campaign specific lyrics and dropped them during the session as they traveled to much laughter from those of us old enough to get the references. The young mage Bebe was a little lost but he had his smartphone so didn’t suffer too much trauma.

The travel was mostly uneventful, but Aldric the Paladin did have a chance to speak with a large group of pilgrims devoted to Hextor. He had a long conversation with their leader which was respectful and the two groups parted without violence.

Once at Teutch tower, Bebe came alive a bit, seeking out alchemical ingredients and picking the local, extraplanar purple flowers that decorated the eastern facing slopes of the Friendship Hills. He was certain that they were mind-altering when eaten despite being informed that they simply tasted like edible blossoms and turned his mouth purple. He staggered in a placebo high while the rest of the party enjoyed more train-themed songs.

They got on the newly constructed subway train that went in a loop through all the domains of the west, arriving in Bigtoe’s personal domain of Carnotkhan many hours later. Bigtoe met with them and laid out the terms of his deal which offered commission on each sale of a subway system to the lords of Oberholt. He also produced a model of a train in a cabinet on wheels and a bag full of SWAG, conductor’s hats with his business logo on the side.

The party accepted the terms and stayed for Gwendolyn to perform at the grand opening of the subway. Not knowing what a train actually was, the bard did her best, closing with classics from the chart topping band Train like Toes of Jupiter, Meet Virginia, and Hey Soul Sister. Laughs were had by all except Bebe who I’m pretty sure didn’t know who Train was. When queried whether we were too old or “boomers” as the kids love to say, he responded, “Jokes I don’t get, day drinking, and jokes I don’t get? Yeah, you’re boomers.”

Throughout the travels, Bebe had been attempting to collect herbs and experiment with them, often making him sick, but on the way back to Oberholt he finally found William Holden and copped some hallucinogenic substance on a postage stamp of a red frog. That put him down for the rest of the trip but seemed to satisfy his curiosity. I’m not sure why this campaign attracts drug addict mages but there it is.

By sending messages ahead, they shaved off a little time from their anticipated meetings with the lords of the land, beginning with Lord Grueller Deinwick. While he was interested in the idea, he simply did not have room in the budget considering two of his fortresses had been destroyed in the last 6 months. He would need subsidies from the Baron in order to even entertain the idea.

Lord Delco Talston was unavailable for quite some time, so they moved on to Millon and the cleric of Ehlonna Redcorn who ran the place. This was another domain level PC played by the same player as Bigtoe and Aldric. I don’t allow players to play their domain level dudes when met during session to try and keep the handouts to a dull roar. 

Redcorn hates Teutch, hates Bigtoe, and hates the unnatural abominations of automatons despite the protestations of his player. He could be convinced to give it some serious thought if his liege Lord Delco Talston was on board but he was pretty strongly opposed to it off the rip. He did however have a task for the adventurers to handle, but they were focused on the train thing and blew him off.

Off to Bellport and the Baron Heinrik of Donwal, the key to the kingdom so to speak. If they could get the big dog on board they were sure it would sway others to fall in line. Unfortunately their meeting was to be several days in the future, which would cause them to miss their meeting with Lord Talston. They rescheduled and since we were up against the 14 day buffer of future time, we called the session there.

Musings:

Welcome new player Bebe. Kind of a slow session to start the game off with, traveling in civilized lands. Lots of sheep and merchants but he made the best of it. He’s got creative ideas and I hope he gets a chance to realize them.

ACKS has mercantile or domain XP thresholds for missions like this, where there is some risk but not the same as delving a dungeon or clearing a lair. It explains how politicians and merchants level to gain proficiencies to further their vocations without necessarily being badass adventurers. Just because someone’s leveled in ACKS doesn’t necessarily mean they’re tough, which is something I like.

You have to maintain separation of interests as best you can in these situations, which is why I don’t let the players play their patron level PCs live. Despite their protestations to the contrary, they will blur those lines and make every mission much too easy or profitable. Fortunately, it is well-documented that Redcorn and Bigtoe don’t care for each other, so I just cranked that to 11 and ignored the pragmatic commentary from the player.

I’ve got a patron at the helm of the Baron now, which takes some pressure off of me. I encouraged the group to discuss these things with the Baron in downtime, but they’re well into the future so it’ll be a minute.

Session 65: Back to the Well

3/17/24-3/19/24, rest 3/20, active 3/21

PC: Gwendolyn, Flynn, Aldric

Hench: Madrof, Mahin, Amadayo, Poe

#ACKS

A bit of a bombshell was dropped in downtime as Zektel of Team B related to the party that Lord Tyring (Patron Paladin) apparently had evidence against that group pointing to their alleged involvement in the December arson in Bellport. A long conversation was had in regards to what actions they may take to mitigate this danger. Ultimately, the players decided on playing Team A for the session in order to keep Team B flexible in case they had to flee the country or something.

Redtoe’s player couldn’t convince anyone to take on any of his offered treasure maps, so the group went back to Ornaron’s Spear, the underwater dungeon off the coast of Bellport. A quick encounter with a couple Hobgholls was their only real challenge before arriving at the great mural with platinum accents. In true adventurer fashion, they destroyed a beautiful piece of artwork in order to pry the platinum accents out of it.

The group continued on through the room that was previously pouring blood rain, this time only experiencing a drizzle. Flynn was curious about the portal but they moved on. Lots of buffs were stacked prior to entering the room where they believed an ochre ooze waited. It did, and was waiting for them due to the “We Will Rock You” that Gwendolyn was chanting for Inspire Courage.

The thing was very tough and immune to most types of damage, huge and slimy and cleaving through summoned manes easily. Once Aldric was able to get some fire on it they realized that was the move and big AC kept them safe while the rest of the party got after it. Unfortunately there was no treasure so they moved on.

The next room had gale force winds blowing debris and sand and grit everywhere, clearly dangerous to anyone who would brave the storm to collect the treasure that had accumulated in the corners and creases. A successful dispel magic from Flynn calmed the storm and they counted up a solid loot score. Sharing the load and leaving a bunch of copper behind, Team A extracted to the boat where Flynn convinced everyone to return to the dungeon and look at the portal or the bottomless snake statue on a previous level by mocking them for having no sense of adventure.

Bullying works. Back into the dungeon and straight to the snake hole, a large coiled serpent of obsidian with a cavity in the center. I frankly had no idea what this was so when the party secured a rope and Flynn started climbing down, I relied on my ever-trusty 2d6 to tell us what was up. I let Flynn roll it in the open and assigned very vague “low bad high good” criteria in my head. He rolled very poorly and the party was chattering a bit about what that might mean. I grabbed one of their ideas and behold, there’s a giant worm at the bottom that tried to snap up Flynn. And did. And killed him in one shot. Gulp.

The rest of the group reeled in the suddenly slack rope and dipped out, convinced by the massive chewing noises and uneasy feeling that this thing wasn’t gonna stay down there that there was no helping ole Flynn the Crusader.

The rest of the session was discussion around the heroic funeral and reserve xp systems in ACKS, which we’ve never used before. I suspect after this session everyone’s gonna have a clear will written up.

Musings:

I didn’t expect them to go back to the dungeon but I’m glad they did since there was a solid score of treasure still there. Sucked for me to know that it was left behind. Flynn’s push to adventure was the right call imo, playing tee-ball is boring. It didn’t work out this time but if it had, he’d be a hero. Either way my man’s gonna get a big ole send off so that his next PC doesn’t have to start at 1st level. I can’t imagine anyone goes back in that place but there’s still a giant worm in a hole and a portal to an unknown location awaiting those of adventurous nature to discover.

Sojenka Exit Thoughts

The Sons of Mithra have retired after completing our objective within the Shadows over Sojenka Campaign and have been tasked by the DM with providing some parting thoughts about our time there. These are my feelings on the game as a founding player of the Tuesday group. I played Cassander the Fighter and Castile the Paladin and was the primary Caller during sessions. I also developed our tracking system for our economic and military assets.

I will begin with opportunities for improvement and obstacles to gameplay. This is intended purely as constructive criticism as requested by the DM and in no way should impugn any member of the campaign’s playstyle or reputation as fine men and accomplished gamers.

The economics of the game struggled to adequately support and balance the efforts taken by different members of the campaign. The DM used several different sources and game rules to put together a system for play, often caught off guard by the specific needs of the session or downtime requests at hand, which created gaps that could be exploited. This issue was almost solved by the DM asking if a swap to ACKS was the right choice earlier in the campaign. It was the right choice in hindsight but at the time we had begun to exploit the gaps and were unwilling to lose the effort that had been spent by both DM and players to cobble something workable together. We voted against it. I do not recall the other members’ of the campaign votes.

The aforementioned Frankensystem, as we so lovingly called it, ended up being quite a point of friction. It’s unreasonable to expect a DM and party of players to create a game system by cobbling pieces together from all over on the fly. We are not game designers. The Blueholme ruleset that the game started with was simply insufficient to the task that we ended up putting it to, which was beyond the scope of the original stated purpose of the campaign.

Originally, players were solicited to join a campaign to explore the megadungeon of Tonisborg and all the faction play that that would entail. Events during the game led us to press into the domain and military side of campaigning early on and the DM graciously obliged. We also perceived, fairly or not, that there was a competitive aspect to the game due to a separate group of players in the same campaign and the presence of Patrons. In retrospect, I believe we took that competition more seriously than some others.

A more dynamic environment could have been achieved with more freedom allowed between Patrons and players. Instead communication with and even the identity of Patrons was carefully monitored and restricted until very late in the game. I’m sure this was part of the experimental nature of the campaign. Everyone involved has to get comfortable with the flow of things.

We learned early on that our contemporaries in the Thursday group were playing many PCs per player during a single session. I felt then as I do now that this is an exploit. Rather than hiring henchmen for specific tasks/roles/abilities and managing a team, you can simply create the needed roles without all the headache of managing their loyalty. With very small groups of two to four members each, the DM was probably lenient about this in order to improve survivability but Tuesday only fell to this dark path in the final sessions. Even then it wasn’t necessary and I regret that we did.

Now on to things that were successful and well-done with the campaign. We played for a year in an exciting, growing, living world with an experienced and thoughtful DM. We set objectives and achieved them in a satisfying enough way that we could, as much as you ever can, call it a victory. The reality is that barring disaster, this style of game rarely “ends”. It’s a series of ever-developing scenarios. We set a win condition for ourselves but could easily have kept playing into the evolving landscape.

The DM set forth a scenario involving a megadungeon that we almost immediately flipped the table over on. He graciously endured our shenanigans and leaned into the direction of the game that we were most interested in, despite not being prepared for it. This is the correct tack to take and proper DMing. The game is only as successful as the group as a whole makes it through their excitement and engagement.

The world-building was on point, with a rich and varied set of cultures, monsters, and a general vibe that was definitely not the standard western European medieval fantasy setting. The DM clearly enjoys preparing setting details like that and for those desiring deep immersion this guy’s got you covered. I only regret that some of it was wasted on our sloped-browed wargaming antics.

The adventure locations and magic items that we experienced during the game were some of the most interesting that I’ve had the pleasure to come across and I’ve been playing D&D and the like for 30 years. The Sons of Mithra faction is still in play with many of these items so I won’t go into detail but if you’re into content inspired by classic pulp fiction then again, this guy’s got you covered.

One of the most positive experiences of this campaign was the cohesion shown by the members of our party. Generally, adventuring parties are a loose gathering of independent actors who seem to rarely show any concern for overall objectives beyond their own petty goals. Not so this time. We started the game with a fixed objective as a win condition and sought to achieve it with every action taken. It was truly satisfying to play the game as a team.

In general, training times and other “time jail” mechanics are designed to encourage multiple PCs played by the same player. These separate parties are traditionally at odds with one another and are in fact encouraged by Gygax in AD&D to explicitly avoid cooperation. This separation of interests is key to avoiding the development of an overwhelming power base and stagnant game world. While I agree with this approach, it was interesting for the DM to allow each PC to be part of the same party and pursue a collective goal. One of our teammates became our utility player, generating a different useful utility class when one was in time jail. This allowed our mercenary company to have a toolbox to choose from when approaching challenges that normally would not be available. It was fun but ultimately I think tradition should win out in this regard.

The DM and players in our group had varying but solid experience with wargames. It was exhilarating to be able to apply those concepts to an RPG campaign even if it felt like sometimes we were the only ones playing that game style. This is another spot where the Frankensystem hurt a little in that generating an army is generally a very specific thing based on system. Combining systems gets a little messy but we learned a lot from how to do it procedurally and had a lot of fun marching around stomping out enemies.

There were many Patrons involved with this campaign at varying levels of complexity. One thing that stood out early on was that the DM ran on monthly and weekly turns for Patron level actions. This seemed to allow him to keep organized and throttle the demand on his time. I liked it so much that I’ve applied something similar in my own campaign with a “State of the Faction” kind of update weekly to keep up with what’s going on.

Ultimately, this campaign was a success and a lot of fun for our group. We set and achieved our goals as a team, experienced a rich and unique setting, and got to experiment with a lot of different aspects of RPGs. I don’t know what the future holds for the Sons of Mithra or the Shadows over Sojenka campaign, but I know that they’re in good hands. I will continue to game with these gents into the future and look forward to the next table.

Session 64: Jump on that Grenade

3/10/24-3/12/24, rest 3/13, active 3/14

PC: Gwendolyn, Legany, Galt

Hench: Amadayo, Mahin, Madrof, Godfried, Chase, Thomas, Mike, Freddy

#ACKS

The session led off with discussion about potential targets, with one player attempting to refrain from pressing for his own interests in the form of missions from his name level PCs. The party decided to try and finish off the Black Shaft dungeon which they felt was nearing completion. I allowed for the likelihood that resources from PCs that were not present would be available in lieu of any downtime action declaring otherwise, so they had magical light and a boat to get them in.

They went straight down towards the lowest unexplored level but ran into some assassin bugs just like the ones from last session. We learned that last week’s miracle victory using the Hypnotic Sigil spell had an asterisk by it since the spell only affects Humanoids. I need to read spells in conjunction with players rather than trust what I’m told! There was a hard fought battle that almost broke the players’ morale but they carried on at least to scout out the next level, accompanied by a conjured fire elemental dubbed Mr. Sparkles.

The landing at level 5 had flashing magical images appearing randomly throughout the room of the ACKS goddess Lammala in battle and/or lustful contention with the ACKS god Ornaron. When I described these entities abstractly since Oberholt uses the Greyhawk pantheon, the party dubbed them Ursula and King Triton from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, with Gwendolyn’s player hittin’ us with the “well actually'' when he was called Poseidon. We promptly got a collective grip.

They explored a little and discovered a trap of some kind. The party chose to avoid it rather than disarm it. A large mural of a storm tossed sea dominated the entire wall of a long chamber with the whitecaps and accents inlaid with platinum. Some attempts were made to estimate the value and how long it would take to remove all the little pieces. The group chose to come back to that later.

A gale of raining blood ruined visibility and made for quite a disgusting scene in one room, so they noped away from that. A mural of a stern-faced King Triton overlooking the next relatively small room gave them pause, since the ceiling was obscured by storm clouds and lightning walked along the walls about waist high. There was much discussion about which room was worse, blood or lightning, before they sent Mr. Sparkles across to see what might happen. Predictably, lightning blasted the creature. They chose to dismiss it rather than pull it back to them and suffer another lightning bolt. How kind of them. Mr. Sparkles hung them a flaming middle finger when he faded away.

Back to the blood room and in they went, doing their best to protect themselves but ultimately failing. They discovered a plinth of obsidian like stone that had a plaque inset within it and a marble portal that pulsed with a rhythmic light. The plaque crawled with shifting arcane symbols in an unknown language, the same language was on the marble archway but in a much different tone.

While the rest endured the downpour, Thomas the thief attempted to remove the plaque. I called this a Trapbreaking check, which he failed, and failed, and failed, but no random encounters. Shucks. This gave the party time to summon some manes and prepare to move forward.

Weird arcane plaque finally in hand, they pushed on, discovering another trap just before Galt stepped on it to his certain doom. Backing out, they put one of the manes on triggering it, which released a 10,000 lb Ochre Ooze from a trap door in the ceiling. It smashed the manes flat and the party fled.

They hit on a random encounter on their way out. I made them roll the dice for it and it was bad, two humanoid females with snakes for hair and wings and straight busted faces. ACKS II Gorgons are like badass Medusae, but they had a max reaction check. So what to do with that?

Well, first the stone gaze was voluntary. So the monsters didn’t hit em with that, yet. Second, they were affiliated with Nasga, the ACKS Chaotic goddess of beauty, pain, and lust, so they were gonna be a bit sketchy with their motivations and ambitions. Third, they were super tough and knew it, so were going to negotiate from a position of extreme strength.

I decided that they were going to demand a frankly absurd amount of gold as a toll to leave their level of the dungeon safely. They gave the vague impression that they would take trade in flesh as well, whatever that meant. Some members thought it was just sacrificing one of their own to their death. Others thought it was something dangerously sexual. After a painfully long discussion, the ever-greedy Galt opted to give himself into their custody rather than pay the toll, gaining an assurance that they would drop “whatever was left of him” at the beginning of the dungeon.

I whiffed here as the Lawful Crusaders in the party probably would not have been comfortable with this arrangement, but they have a shitload of henches and I miss things like that sometimes. The party left Galt with a healing potion, a blindfold, and an inspire courage from Gwendolyn the bard. They were able to get out without any further encounters and deposit their tablet on the boat with one of their tougher henches to guard it while most of the party returned to wait for Galt’s delivery to the entrance.

I decided to have the resolution of his… uh… encounter… resolved by a mortal wounds check. Death by snu snu was certainly possible, but I allowed him to use his healing potion as part of the recovery. The bonuses went his way and he only suffered notable scarring as dictated by the Savage Mortal Wounds table. The party scooped him and sailed back to town.

After a day’s rest and some magical healing, they returned to Jolus the Laughing Skull with donuts in hand for Irrelevant the Caretaker. The party was led up the mystical tower where previously it was a brutal, arduous climb. This time they walked easily to the Master’s room and met with Jolus a la Emperor of Mankind on his golden throne. A psychic image entered their minds and thanked them for delivering the agreed spell formula before it broke into a thousand pieces and was absorbed by the corpse-like figure on the mechanical seat.

Payment was never discussed when they took the mission, surprising no one more than myself, so now they were offered “Power or Riches.” Characteristically, they chose Riches unanimously and piles of treasure materialized at their feet. They scooped it, waved goodbye, and immediately sold what they didn’t want and traveled to Millon to trade Redcorn for some items. End of session.

Musings:

Disappointed that I didn’t press the issue with the Lawfuls in the party. Unless they’ve got interest in that portal, I think Team A is done with the Black Shaft. Congratulations to the team on a successful objective.