Session 61: Catching Up

1/31/2-2/18/24, rest 2/19, active 2/20

PC: Gwendolyn, Cleet, Legany, Galt

Hench: Amadayo, Mahin, Madrof, Chase, Terry, Mike, Freddy, Cleric_02, Thief_03, Thief_04

#ACKS

The last time we played, the session ended on a cliffhanging revelation that “Oh shit, that pool in the dungeon turns gold into platinum, we have to go back!” Despite knowing better, I chose to stop time until the next session. I didn’t want to abstract the return to the dungeon which ACKS has rules for and there was tension over the pool being active for a limited time.

The entire session was overcoming the challenges of stopping time in a living world. It was exacerbated by the fact that my domain level patrons/players started a war with each other that had been going for about a month in the background. As the players began to interact with more of the world that had been moving into the future, the inability to really alter events that already transpired was telling.

Avoid stopping time in a fixed time game if at all possible. The preservation of the tension over the pool was not worth the clunky session catching up to the living world that had already moved on.

Anyway, the group got their supplies together and went right back to the dungeon. They brought every gold piece they could muster on the off chance of being to convert it to platinum in the pool. The sailors of the “Keef Richards”, Cleet the Mage’s boat and veterans of this trip, rubbed silver coins gotten from the dungeon for good luck as Galt dove into to secure the group’s safety line to the underwater dungeon.

Once the group got in it was pretty easy to descend to the deeper levels. The stairs were all located in the same room. The challenge was that going deeper meant tougher obstacles. The overall mission of the dungeon was to retrieve a spell formula somewhere in the dungeon but they had yet to locate it.

It was easy to locate the pool room but they arrived to find a pack? Clutch? Gaggle? Definitely a gaggle of giant draco lizards vibing around the boiling water of the pool. Previously, the water had been a whirlpool, so there was a red flag there, but of immediate interest was the very large potentially deadly lizards.

The party was surprised, all except Cleet, who fired off his signature move the hypnotic pattern spell. The crew didn’t really know the disposition of the lizards but given the surprise round chose to act rather than react. Several of the lizards were mesmerized but the remaining two closed on and started chomping on the front line. After a pretty tough battle in which Legany the Barbarian was downed, the remaining lizard broke morale and fled.

Experimentation with the pool went poorly, the party learning that the bubbling liquid was actually acid of some kind. The transformation magic was dead and I chose this moment to relate to the party that in the AD&D DMG, the magic pools that convert gold are one use only. I had generated this dungeon using Appendix A of that book and it was the second such pool they had found historically.

With the pool checked off, the group descended to the unexplored 4th level of the dungeon. Their first explored room away from the stairs revealed these massive bug creatures with prominent foreclaws that scared them very much, so they heroically closed and spiked the door shut and courageously went the other direction.

The door to the next room was dried and brittle in an environment that was humid, sticky, and gross. Legany asked questions about fire or heat, which was smart, but there was no obvious heat radiating from the room or anything. When the party broke in, they found an empty, dry, and brittle room with an exit. 

I’m a soft DM and asked several times what they were doing before entering the room. They didn’t send their thief in to search for traps, so when the group walked through as a whole the fireball trap that dropped from the ceiling was pretty scary. When the smoke cleared, Terry and Freddy the henches and Cleet the mage were toast and the rest of the party was quite wounded.

After the lizards, bugs, and fireball trap the group was very hesitant to continue so they bounced. Back in town they buried their dead, bought some healing, and hired some henchmen. They pivoted here trying to find a quick score through rumors and this is where the pain of catching up to the stop time issues ramped up.

The party long ago had tried to save Maisie of Millon from bandits or something around the city of Valestrian but learned that she had apparently run off to marry Lord Eros Tyring of Blackhold. Fast forward over a year to the very pregnant Maisie being present in Bellport for the birth of her child. There were some public comments and announcements in the Discord server from the Patron running Tyring about the situation so the players latched on to it as a potential hook They were convinced that Maisie needed rescuing and contrived for Gwendolyn to get a meeting with her and play music for her and braid hair and have pillow fights or whatever girls do.

It was nice to have knowledge of the principals in question and what they had done, but it was disappointing that the players could not really change the course of events leading up to the current date because we stopped time.

Convinced that Maisie was not a prisoner and earning an invitation to the reception after the naming of the child, Gwendolyn went back to the bar and chilled. Meanwhile, the others were tailing Chimichonga Applesauce (player generated name) the taxman and learning where he lived. That night, they broke into his house, rounded up all the staff into the cellar, and planned to educate Chimichonga about the thieves’ guild terms.

Somewhere in the chaos, Cleet the mage escorted the taxman to his boat and planned a very different intimidation tactic. While the party stripped the guy’s house bare of easily stolen valuables, Cleet’s new boat the “Going Nowhere” sailed out to sea with a magically sleeping government official stowed away. When he awoke, he found himself on the docks in a foreign town with a strongly worded suggestion to get on board with the thieves’ guild or next time won’t have a happy ending.

The party regrouped and counted their ill-gotten gains, got their reward from the thieves’ guild, and FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH THE CALENDAR.

Musings:

Stopping time in a 1:1 game is not worth the squeeze most of the time. The exception that I can think of is if session play goes very far into the future. That works better because there are less moving parts stuck in a weird time paradox. It’s just the party and not the ENTIRE WORLD. If you can’t tell I was pretty frustrated with myself for stopping time.

The session went in an interesting direction, with the players craving some kind of score. The dungeon is tough in the deeper levels so having a fallback is an option, but if they want the big score, they’ll have to get in there at some point. I probably over-rewarded for the thieves’ guild thing but some interesting events happened there that will potentially develop into threads later.

Session 59: Trench Foot Epidemic

 

1/21/2-1/29/24, rest 1/30, active 1/31

PC: Valda, Zektel, Brumdor, Cracaryn

Hench: Elizabete

#ACKS

Today the players were back on Team B, looking to capitalize on the previous session’s score that was in transit to the patron who was going to pay them for it. Using 1:1 time means abiding by the calendar so even though they were sure to have a big payout, they still had to worry about logistics. We love logistics.

The group traveled across the map to the Friendship Hills, home of Teutch the Alchemist and Bigtoe the Wombat. Along the way they did a little shopping and Zektel sent a request to Gwendolyn the Goat for a song to be commissioned about his beautiful snake haired girlfriend. When they arrived in Deinwick they found the purple, pink, and gold magical walls that were a product of the Brigstein had been vandalized along the interior with crass anti-Teutch graffiti.

Between Deinwick and Rushford they ran across a small procession carrying a palanquin of a foreign noble. The group’s default signal for parley is for Zektel to hoist his underwear on a stick as a flag. The guards of the procession thought this was pretty funny and chuckled amongst themselves. After a brief chat both sides carried on.

Once across the Friendship Bridge and into the Hills, the party waited on their convoy to arrive. They were dismayed to discover that Mel the Thief henchman had run off with the golden Aquila of the Emperor that they were certain was worth quite a bit. The other goods arrived without issue. Bigtoe offered them some rewards that varied based on whether or not these items were powered by his white whale “purple cake” material. They agreed and decided to get to work on something else while waiting for the dwarf to tinker with the unfamiliar technology of an Astartes chainsword and frag grenade.

That something else turned out to be recon into the Order of Battle for Nekane the Great’s vaults directly to the north. Bigtoe was paying big to find a weakness that he could exploit in Nekane’s domain so the group began to plan their infiltration.

Nekane’s people are known to be a little ornery so they asked the dwarf craftpriest hench Elizabete to help Brumdor get into the vault. A poor 2d6 roll for obedience meant the dwarf hench was not happy with the dwarf on dwarf aggression and opted out. The party left her at the tower.

The guards on Nekane’s vault are characteristically grumpy and the first attempt to gain access does not go well, punctuated by an off-color joke attempted by Zektel who botched the punchline in a true Michael Scott embarrassing moment. The party was run off and decided to wait for a shift change and try again. Waiting in the mountains is dangerous but they were not punished for it.

The second attempt went better and the party was allowed entry and guided to the town far below through twisty confusing tunnels. No one but Brumdor had any chance of getting out the way that they came in. Some terrible attempts at trying to get in good with the locals at the bar led to a different approach. Zektel fabricated a parasitic trench foot type disease that was affecting only dwarves. He absolutely HAD to inspect the dwarven troops to prevent a massive epidemic.

The reaction rolls for this went significantly better, getting the group in front of the Master Armorer. Nekane couldn’t be bothered with it but his right hand felt it couldn’t hurt to have them inspect a platoon just to see. One of the players started offering ideas that Zektel could use the tenets of his order as an excuse to gain access. Zektel was Neutral however and had no order, which led to claims of being part of “Doctors without Orders” to many chuckles. 

The party was led through “The Tunnel” to a series of corridors where a platoon of dwarven soldiers were posted to guard. The NCO on duty was skeptical but allowed a quarantined area to be established and a thorough inspection performed of each dwarven soldier. Zektel found a few dwarves showing discolored toenails which he claimed was a serious indication of infection. This was of course bullshit but he used his high ranks in healing to inflict further discomfort on these poor dwarves and ratchet up the symptoms, all pointing at the Trench Foot that culminated in creeping nematodes, allegedly parasites that would burst forth from the foot and required amputation.

Great pains were taken to express how serious this disease was, including advising against any foot on foot contact which we all fell out over. Zektel’s player was on fire. The humor dried up quick when the NCO sent for the dwarven head medical official. When he arrived, he had a miserable roll to determine the cause of the afflicted dwarves’ red, rashy feet. He was suspicious and took the patients away to his own quarantine.

The party sensed that the jig was up but were denied a guide to exit at this late hour. They camped with the dwarven platoon and were sweating being arrested or worse. Overnight they were awoken by the sounds of combat to find a large amorphous blob of shifting flesh, carapace, and teeth attacking the dwarven soldiers on guard. The party joined the battle against the creature, discovering that it was very tough but sporadic, sometimes standing completely still or wailing in pain. It was still able to kill most of the dwarves and nearly Brumdor before the party was able to just run away. They fled down the primary corridor to the entry and their desperate cries for help against “the Trenchfoot Monster” convinced the guards to let them through. The doors were sealed and the session ended back at the Bearded Axe, the tavern that the party visited when they first arrived.

Musings:

I RP’d another of the same player’s high level PCs during this session. He doesn’t always agree with my takes on them but them’s the breaks. I suspect he would have offered much higher payouts for the Astartes equipment but what was offered was fair. I allowed a baseline then a reaction check to dictate whether he went higher or lower. I’m satisfied with the results.

The trench foot epidemic had us all rolling, it was a good time. Clever use of proficiencies to create a problem and offer the solution has developed into an interesting thread. I’m not sure what the players do next here, whether they double down on the trench foot or try to beat feet outta there before they get caught out. We’ll find out soon!

Session 60: Heavy is the Pocket

1/28/2-1/29/24, rest 1/30, active 1/31

PC: Gwendolyn, Flynn, Cleet, Galt

Hench: Amadayo, Mahin, Madrof, Chase, Terry, Mike, Freddy, Poe

#ACKS

Our players chose Team A for the session due to Team B being locked in downtime. They still had the dungeon known as Ornaron’s Spear to explore off of the coast of Bellport and this time their ship captain and definitely not a smuggler Cleet was available. It didn’t take them long to sync up in Bellport and then head to the dungeon.

Diving for the entrance of the Spear is an extra layer of security but their seafaring venturer Galt is well-practiced at it especially now that they had magical light to light their way. He overcame the penalties for attempting it in cold water and in short order the group was inside the dungeon, gaining entry through a zipper latch in the ceiling of the first room.

The strategy appeared to be re-clearing each level of the dungeon that they’d already explored in order to cover their asses before heading deeper. They also wanted to recover some copper and heavier goods that were left behind from the last session. After they dried off from the winter ocean water, they systematically explored both the first and second levels of the dungeon, their only real issues being stuck doors of pock-marked coral that needed busted open.

They broke an evil altar near the site of their previous demise and subsequent corpse recovery a la Everquest circa 2001. The Lawful clerics will gain a little bonus xp for it while the rest of the Neutral party eagerly counted their meager treasure. The following efforts to retrieve a couple hundred gold worth of loot was heroic. I was proud of them for properly calculating their encumbrance and how to carry it all out. Just a shame it was a small amount.

Some wandering Troglodytes tried to stop them and take their loot, but a tanky frontline and oversized party handled business pretty easily despite Cleet the Mage’s best effort to hit everyone with Hypnotic Pattern. The PCs stashed their loot right at the entrance then returned, seeking to make their first delve into level 3.

Now this is a reminder that in ACKS dungeon levels cap at 6, where in AD&D they go much higher and increase in difficulty at smaller intervals. So while level 3 doesn’t sound that high, it’s about mid range in power, so they were starting to get into level appropriate content. A horde of zombies met them at the first room, surprising and attacking them right on the stairs, but their beefy front line soaked the hits while the clerics turned em and made short work of the foes.

The following room contained a steel rod connecting floor to ceiling that hummed gently. Cleet naturally had to touch it which resulted in a shock that did a little damage. The party noped immediately out of that room and continued on where they found a circle of like 20 crabs dancing rhythmically in a circle. Gwendolyn the Bard played a tune and disrupted their tempo, which caused them to scatter into little cracks and crevices in the floor.

There was a whirlpool in the middle of the next room, which Cleet immediately dove into. They watched him flounder around for a bit until he was probably gonna drown before fishing him out. He didn’t feel any different and they moved onto the next room, which had the floor covered in skeletons of various aquatic animals. On closer inspection, the skeletons were formed from random bones broken, carved, and glued to make the correct shapes. There was a bull’s head roaring in pain at the head of a whale or shark or something I forget. One of the clerics turned undead and the evil was banished from it.

The crew was very suspicious of a pile of treasure sitting in a pillar of shining white light. One of their thief henchmen couldn’t find any traps and they didn’t expend any resources so when they scooped all the coins into bags there definitely weren’t any obvious or not so obvious repercussions. It was getting late so they made their way out of the dungeon and back to town with nary a random encounter. One of those light sessions.

After a while of shopping and chilling to wrap up the session, Cleet realized that the gold in his pouch had changed into platinum. A firestorm of OH WE HAVE TO GO BACK RIGHT NOW and other ways to immediately capitalize on the likely magical pool were floated, eventually settling on stopping time. While I avoid this practice in most situations, as long as the party committed to playing this group the next session I felt it was ok.

The other options were abstracted dungeon delving, which is an mechanic in ACKS but I don’t care for it for an active party of PCs, or just waiting 2 weeks to go back since we aren’t gonna have a session next week. We’ll see if it was a mistake for our next session.