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.