4/7/24-4/18/24, rest 4/19, active 4/20
PC: Valda, Zektel, Brumdor, Cracaryn
Hench: Elizabete, Arif, Zero, Taco
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.
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