Session 37: Into the Butzkrag

5/21/23-5/26, 5/27 rest, 5/28 active
PCs: Gwendolyn (Bard), Luther (Paladin), Redcorn (Cleric), Clete (Mage), Caspian (Bard)
Henches: Mulligan, Amadayo, Mahin, Madroff, Beyza, Eggie, Jaylen, Jarod, Gucci (temporary)
#ACKS

After the victory over the beastman occupying force of the Butzkrag, a religious or ritual location for the humanoids of the Bone Marches, Lord Issac and Bishop Redcorn put the word out for the famous Team A to clear the dungeon of evil and put a stop to the Dark Hymn once and for all.

The heroes answered the call, adding two new PCs to the group in Clete the Mage described as a sketchy tweeker that you’d hire in a Home Depot parking lot and Caspian the Bard, a swashbuckling singer of sea shanties. They also had a ton of henchmen, putting their party into the comically large range for a dungeon delve. They were taking this thing seriously, which is good. I mean, I abstain from any commentary on the validity of player actions.

The first part of the session was a lot of exposition for the benefit of the newer guys about setting and events leading up to where they found themselves. Clete’s player had a leg up having read the previous session reports so that was cool. Once we got that squared away the party set off from Talston towards Riverstride.

Redcorn introduced some of the party to Lord Issac (Patron Paladin) who hadn’t met him before while others avoided the notorious Hanger of PCs. Issac let them know that he intended to meet them out at his forward base and remain on site while they delved. With access to troops and magic from his retainers, this could be quite a boon for an injured party returning from the dungeon in the form of safety to rest and additional healing to recover.

The team set out towards Northbridge, stopping off at Hakim’s roadside emporium. There was grumbling about him not dealing in magic items but when do PCs not grumble? He was happy to see them as usual and sold them some rope and other normal things.

They had a pretty easy trip aside from having to leave the troops behind, realizing again that armies move slow. They set their mercs to travel with Issac’s supply train and carried on, arriving at the Yellow River Base camp a half a hex or so away from their target location. The mercs would catch up when they could.

Issac flew out to meet them on a giant hawk, wishing them well and sending some troops to guard the entrance to the Butzkrag, a giant Flannish aztec style pyramid with a winding, irregular staircase leading into a dark and evil dungeon. I’m trying to more clearly emphasize the supernatural nature of dungeons and will continue to do so moving forward. These are not mundane mineshafts in the ground, these are dark, dank, cesspools of danger.

They landed deep in the pyramid in a room with several doors. Every surface of the room up to about 8 or 9 feet was covered in layer on layer of foul beastman graffiti. Eggie the henchman thief started checking doors while others tried to decipher some of the graffiti. One door had fluttering sounds behind it and there were more recent symbols showing winged skulls painted on while another had symbols that the nerds in the group were able to determine meant food.

They chatted a bit about options before testing the winged skull door, Luther the paladin pulling it open to peek inside. He was immediately swarmed by winged anteater shaped creatures. One of the henches rolled high initiative and slammed into the door to close it before the creatures could bite anyone’s face off. The party chose to leave that room alone.

They went into what they called the “food” door, discovering dozens of bodies laid out on the floor with rough burlap tarps thrown over them. The group made no effort to investigate, picking their way through the room and out through another hallway. I guess a beastman meat storage wasn’t that interesting idk.

Down a dark hallway to an intersection and another choice of direction. The caller for this session was Gwendolyn who was trying to maintain a methodical approach to exploration by taking all left turns, so they took the lefternmost direction and the front rank immediately fell into a pit trap, Luther and Beyza collapsing at the bottom of everyone’s favorite trap. They didn’t blame the caller, climbed out of the hole, and carried on.

They rounded a corner and saw the door ahead of them closing. Eggie rushed forward to listen but didn’t hear anything. They busted in like big damn heroes to find a room filled with broken crates, barrels, and such but no sign of an enemy. The group checked it over carefully and found some stashed loot but nothing else while others applied a little comfrey to the pit-divers.

The crew proceeded cautiously and arrived at a six-way intersection which was fun to describe to the mapper. I succumbed to a moment of weakness and just showed him that section of the map for him to copy. I will burn that out of myself for next time. True to form they went left here to another four way and grumbling about so many directions to go.

This went on for a while, left, left, left, all the while they learned more about the dungeon’s layout, verified that it reconnected onto the original chamber in several places. They found a door which Eggie checked as was customary and determined there was definitely a trap. While trying to disarm it, he triggered it and took a spear from the ceiling, nearly killing him. He limped back to the group and announced, “Disarmed the trap, boss.” Eggie’s a trooper.

Entering this room and finding nothing obvious, the logic was thrown out that you don’t trap rooms with nothing in them, so they carefully searched over the place before finding a secret door in one corner. This led to another door that was locked. They chose violence on this one, applying a crowbar and the will of Heironeous in the form of Luther leaning on it.

The door popped open to a waiting band of berserkers, clearly unhappy at their back entrance being invaded. Gwendolyn rushed forward to parley and narrowly avoided immediate combat by confusing them with some chatter and then playing some music. The leader of the pack was Gucci, a wiry fellow with a weird tick when he talked and a strange unblinking stare. He was not super impressed by the adventurers but his crew was digging the music so he gave it a chance.

This turned out to be a mistake made by the uncultured berserkers as Gwendolyn’s Magical Music proficiency took hold, charming them into being much more friendly. From here it was a short jump to hiring the berserkers onto their already large party, nearly doubling its size. Gucci was much more forthcoming with information now, telling them about morlocks in the northern wing of the place that simply had to go. He also told them about a wild room just off of this one that would trip them out. He encouraged them to experience it and twitched again in a totally not suspicious way. Despite appearances, the berserkers informed Clete that they were out of mushrooms and pretty bummed by that. So was Clete.

The party investigated to find a very small closet, about 6 feet on a side, with a single coin-sized obsidian disc set into the mathematical center of each surface. Gucci laughed and said yeah touch them, and twitched again. There was much consternation among the players at this point. Luther detected evil and definitely found some glowing around each disc and Clete hit on a Loremastery check, allowing him to recall from his studies that this type of thing smacked of the involvement of the trickster god Olidammara and the god of risks, Norebo, as rites of passage, the effects of which could be virtually anything.

They briefly discussed interacting with it anyway, with the leveled, Lawful players jokingly pushing the new guys to touch it, what did they have to lose? Fortunately it didn’t go any further and no one lost any class powers as the decision was ultimately made to attempt a Dispel Magic from Redcorn, which worked in a shower of black sparks.

Gucci pointed out a few traps and a staircase leading down along their way to the morlock wing of the dungeon. Once nearby, Gwendolyn used her Inspire Courage ability since they were pretty sure the berserkers were going to fight anyway. Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song had the boys so geeked up that they charged off into the room, engaging the waiting morlocks in a rush.

This party was already relatively powerful for the first level of this dungeon. Adding a bunch of cannon fodder didn’t balance the scales any so the fight was pretty short and one-sided. They beat down a bunch of eyeless savage humanoids and white apes, the final one running away to be chased down by one of Redcorn’s tigers, and lost a few berserkers in the scrum who didn’t seem to care one bit.

They proceeded further into the wing, discovering the bulk of the morlocks in a bit of a better position to fight back. Their reaction was high which indicated they really didn’t want to fight. The party gave them the option of relocating or dying and they chose the former, packing their meager belongings and women and children and being marched out of the dungeon. They went down the opposite side of the pyramid from the waiting troops and Trail of Tears’d it out into the wilderness. They were at least lucky that night had fallen.

Back in the dungeon and running low on session time, the group rushed through the morlock wing that was clear now, finding the pen they kept apes in and their treasure trove. There was another pit that I think Gucci fell in, but he laughed it off and climbed out.

Continuing on, the group discovered a perfectly spherical chamber of some matte black metal that no one was familiar with. It gave off serious sinister vibes to the Cleric and Paladin but did not register on a detect evil or detect magic. It was wrong on some primal, instinctual level but did not appear to be actively harmful. At the bottom of the bowl was a crop of black mushrooms which Clete made careful note of but did not mention interest in yet. Maybe next time.

In a couple of these hallways on this side of the dungeon they found chimneys, one up and one down. I think the player reaction was such that they were thinking of a fireplace chimney that’s not really a passage. I need to do better about describing things that I take for granted as these chimneys were certainly large enough for people to pass through, albeit with some effort made to climb safely.

Anyway the crew looped back to the entrance and linked up with the waiting soldiers outside to rest at the Yellow River Base, which I consider safe enough to count as a stopping point for terms of resting and xp gain.

Musings:

New players are fun, glad to have them. Redcorn’s player is very outgoing and talks about ACKS at the local shops and things, so it’s cool to see his excitement infecting others.

This is another dungeon that’s been here for ages, so it’s interesting to see how it changes from what I originally wrote to several generations of restocking/conflict checks. The more or less random exploratory factions appeared to have settled into wings, of which the group has found two so far.

It was generated using Appendix A of AD&D 1e’s DMG. There are conflicting views on if dungeons should be totally random or totally DM generated or some mixture among people in the hobby that I respect. I find that, as in most things, I’m somewhere in the middle. I like the random generation to get something on paper, get a starting place. As I think more about what may or may not be there I can build out from it. It’s worked well in the Grotto and I think it’s gonna be fun here.

An important thing for dungeon delving is patience. Dungeons are often big, multi-leveled endeavors. Sometimes you’re only there to score big and bounce. Sometimes a Patron tasks you with clearing every room of every level, lol. I had no idea that was the case here until the session started, so it’ll be cool to see how the party approaches it, particularly the sessions where they don’t score very much treasure.

Coincidentally, I view dungeons in this manner when I PC. I want to take and seize ground, establish fall back points, continue forward. I am often the minority opinion for this strategy so I was definitely surprised to see it come up here. Hopefully the good guys win and stick it to the Dark Hymn, but we’ll have to see what happens next time.

Session 36: Ghost Ships and Girded Loins

5/7/23-5/15/23, rest 5/16/23, active 5/17/23

PC: Blair (Nightblade), Bigtoe (Machinist), Braxton (Explorer)

Hench: Isabel, Jahanaray, Goda, Platt, Ronin, Rocky, Andi

#ACKS 

A few months ago Braxton the Explorer tripped over a rumor about a magical ship that sails the midnight coast of the Bay piloted solely by cats. You may ask yourself, “Wtf?”, but listen, shut up.

For real though, rumors are a great way to seed things into the game. You may be tempted to use them to gently push the adventurers towards your desired in-game hooks. Or you could write 50 of them in a drunken stupor, drop them in a file, and forget about them until one of the PCs starts searching for a lucrative job opportunity.

I believe that players don’t really care about NPCs or DM generated hooks and while they may seem stupid when solving puzzles or not grasping your brilliant plot, they aren’t. They can smell railroad tracks and abhor nothing more than doing what the DM wants them to do. Players are more likely to latch onto something that they have some personal input into. This is why I have ridiculous rumors and the broadest strokes of prepared environments and locations. When the PCs latch onto something, or come up with something themselves, I’m not scrambling to rewrite all muh preps and force a square peg into a round hole. I’m prepared to improv a session that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy.

So, “cat boat, cat boat” was the chant in the downtime Discord. I stole was inspired by a rule from the Dubzaron campaign that allows using multiple “stacked” rumors to apply to a single topic. As more rumors are hit for the topic, I prompt the rumormongering player as to what they believe the next information regarding the hook should be. Naturally as DM I have veto powers directly and the nature of rumors being inconsistent or unverified gives veto powers indirectly so it doesn’t really matter if they say, “There’s an unguarded treasure hoard tended by kittens in cute hats that has a unicorn horn that grants wishes!” or some other cheesy freebie like that. Sure that’s the rumor that they hear, even down to where this treasure hoard is supposed to be. But what’s actually there is up to me and no one rides for free.

         

Braxton continued to investigate this rumor and the player had determined to use a mutual friend of the table’s online moniker to represent the leader of the Merlantians, an aquatic tribe of fishy naga-like people with a sneaker fetish and “girded loins”. Apparently he believed the cat thing to be misdirection or something. The real target was The Mighty Hammercock, Lord of Merlantis. Again you may ask yourself, “Wtf?” Please, refer to the opening paragraph for any further such questions.

With a target set, the party launched from Deinwick towards the capital of Bellport where they intended to find more information about the Merlantians and buy or hire a boat to take them out on the water. I’ve added a Maps section to the site that might clarify where some things are happening. Anyway, off they went with Bigtoe’s fledgling army as escort. They quickly realized that marching a small army all that way was going to take quite a while, so they traded off some of the mercs with their venturer hench in Talston before continuing on with cavalry for speed.

Once the party arrived in Bellport, several of the group tried to dig up more information about the cat boat, learning that just a week past a lone survivor had washed ashore, telling terrible tales of his ship being attacked in a foggy night-time ambush. Bigtoe wanted to interview this fellow but unfortunately the poor chap had succumbed to his wounds. He had to settle for learning a rough area of the coastline that the fiendish Hammercock might operate along.

Next, the group visited the docks looking for a ship to hire. There were many ships but not many for hire so Braxton approached the harbormaster and greased his palms to keep an eye out for them. We joked around a little about his cheap frugal bribery amounts of like 5 and 9 gold pieces. The harbormaster was unimpressed by the modest offerings but liked the explorer well enough to play ball.

Now they were in a big city which they really had visited rarely and spent very little time in. They wanted to check with the local authorities and get paid for doing something that they were going to do anyway. Adventurers be greedy like that. They learned that Sir Lionel Deinwick, brother to the Lord Deinwick of the West, was acting captain of the guard so they made an appointment and were able to be seen.

He had vague reports of some piracy attributed to this fairy tale and was willing to pay a little for information, but quite a bit more for proof. The party took the mission and slept on it, waiting for the harbormaster to find them a boat.

The next day, after no hits, Braxton decided to poke around in dockside inns for captains that they could approach directly. A solid plan that was supported by the dice because miraculously the first place they went to had a captain’s council of some sort going on. They waited for them to finish before approaching, asking if anyone was willing to carry them out to sea looking for the cat boat. The man at the head of the table, Captain Commodore Victor, seemed to take responsibility for the gathering and asked a few questions, deciding that sure he’d charge them to rent one of his ships and on the absolutely miniscule chance that they actually ran into the cat boat, he wanted half of the treasure that might be recovered. He voluntold one of the attendees to escort the party where they thought they needed to be and the rest kind of snickered to each other about chasing ghost ships.

Captain Newman of The Key was happy to cart the party around for a few days and make a little gold, so off they went, sailing the coast southeast towards a large cove just short of Seafort. They found the cove and looked around a little, but did not find any evidence of past battles. It was night and they were in a cozy spot so decided to chill there and continue the search the next day.

Allowing random results to dictate the game is interesting. The wounded sailor died, bad random roll. Sir Deinwick would see them in a timely fashion and the first bar they looked in was filled with captains, good random rolls. The first encounter rolled out of port was mermen, which was what I had determined would indicate an encounter with the dastardly Merlantians! Let go of the wheel, it’s more dynamic.

Night fell as a dense fog began to roll in. The players got excited, sensing something was afoot. During the midnight watch an eerily silent ship pulled alongside, exchanging arrows with some of the party on duty. The group was finally able to set eyes on the mythical Merlantians, large, broad-shouldered naga-like people armed with bows and tridents and looking disdainfully at the party’s shoddy footwear. Or maybe the Merlantians were the giant sized tabby cats staring disinterestedly from the back ranks of the snake people. Either way, the fight was on.

The enemy stormed the rails of the Key and engaged the party and their mercenary archers that they were able to bring aboard. The naga-like men were obviously trained well and strong, but not terribly threatening on the whole. It was the cats that really scared the group. When the huge animals lept to the Key, they morphed into large beastial humanoids with feline faces and claws.

The bad news for the cats was everyone in the fucking friendly party that had spells had some kind of crowd control options like Light for blinding or Choking Grip. Some really bad saving throws from my end and the powerful element of the enemy’s force was neutered, blinded and/or choking and greatly reduced in combat effectiveness. The cats were able to wear through the dismounted horse archers defending the group, but could only do a little damage to some of the actual party members and henchmen due to high ACs and negatives to attacks from being blinded.

Blair the Nightblade was able to land some solid backstabs with one of the party’s only magical weapons against the catmen and the rest were able to tackle and execute the weakened beasts after several rounds of grappling, including Braxton jumping from the center mast about 20 feet up to try and WWE drop kick one to the ground. There was a lot of build up for this move but he rolled poorly on the attempt and just flopped to the ground, hissing in pain.

The group was ecstatic to have defeated these creatures and captured their ship, but on inspection they realized the Merlantian vessel was in awful shape and probably shouldn’t even have been floating. They quickly searched through it, finding tons of treasure, some magic items, and charts to a mysterious island well off of the coast. They also found an altar depicting a truly fearsome naga-man wearing a wide WWE style championship belt. Offerings around this altar included small lizards, birds, and mice along with candles and incense. Each of the naga-men wore a strange medallion with a man’s face carved into it which the PCs naturally collected.

Bigtoe was all bothered by the Key’s crew not helping in the fight, to which Captain Newman shrugged and said they were transport, they weren’t hired to fight. This was apparently a miscommunication during the deal that Braxton made of such an offensive nature that plans were briefly hatched to murder the entire crew and steal all the loot, turn into a vulture and fly away with most of the loot, etc. These plans were eventually tossed and they opted to tow the captured ship back and offer that as the Commodore’s cut of the treasure.

Captain Newman did not want to tow the ghost ship back to port, but they paid him handsomely and threatened him and other adventurer things until he did so, having his crew lash it to the Key and setting off for home. As dawn broke and sunlight began to bathe the ghost ship, it started to disintegrate, eventually leaving nothing but the towing lines flowing behind the Key. This offended the dwarf Bigtoe even more, renewing his tirade of insulting the ship’s crew as cowards and the Commodore as a con artist.

They stormed into port and marched to the Commodore’s bar, where Bigtoe gave him an ear-full. The Commodore was pissed and not having it and there was a tense back and forth before they eventually agreed to have the magic items identified and they’d split the treasure in half. Victor sent a mage associate of his with the group to get the Tower of the Glowing Hand to identify the items and verify everything was on the up and up. 

Back at the bar, they split the loot and Victor told them to get the fuck out, which the party did. They copped some solid magic items and big ticket jewelry and gems, got paid by Sir Deinwick for returning with the heads of the fish guys, and called it a win.

Musings:

I editorialized during the write up most of my thoughts I think. It was a good session and I’ll reiterate that allowing the players to be involved in rumors and hooks is just tops. They got more treasure than I expected since I just used the recommended ship’s haul for a ship of that type but hey, they could have all died if they hadn't been so ready with the spells. The cats were pretty tough, but this appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. They’ve got charts to an island and a reference to the swolest Merlantian. Let’s see if they care to pursue it.