The Kharmlund Campaign, #8 and #9: A non-Kharmlund Detour! Unlocking the secrets of the universe!

Another month, another two sessions. These are what I call the "detour" sessions, as players begin to leave the mega-dungeon behind, their stores full of glittering jewels and mighty weapons! First they took a wizard's tower, and then learned what that actually entails, becoming an extremely powerful and well-known power in the region, and then they used a potent mixture of poison, sociopathy and the "magic jar" spell to clear out a small bandit camp. Power was gained, and their first true enemy was made! 

Session 8

LVND STATUS: Apogee, Gibbous

Player Characters: Ildaberd, Half-Elf Bard, played by anon.

Aurelius, Half-Orc Fighter, played by anon.

"""Carver""" played by anon.

NPCS: None, except for a brief appearance from Lemmy. 

Begin

The session started with the players meeting up by checking out Rivertown, and learning that the Byzan Empire is not in particular very creative with their naming conventions. Honestly, calling it "rivertown" is probably the upper limits of Byzan administration creativity, it's a far more common thing to call them things like [Area] Fort 01,[Area] Fort 02 etc. They were not stopped at the gate but did note that the guards were more non-Arin-Vosdht(orc) than not.

The Byzantown was a paradise compared to the dumpster-shaped-like-a-town Lester's Folly. 

Lester's Folly is mostly...a pop up settler's town. There are beautiful manors, lots and lots of District 9-level shacks, "inns" that were clearly slapped together to meet ever-rising demand, and trade with Rivertown/a hunting lodge to get supplies from the wilderness. It's a hungry city filled with horrible adventurers who emerge with pockets bursting at the seams with gold and want to live a good life and retire eventually. 

Rivertown is a city that was built to be a stopping off point for trading barges that move around the Empire. It's built to take advantage of the river, there's a special "port" built in at the widest point of the river that allows barges to enter the town and do their trade easily, a fort (RiverFort) that provides and protects a bridge to the western half of Rivertown, and a Tower for a Magus that allows them to protect the town and purify the waters. Water flows into Rivertown and provides fresh drinking water through some impressive engineering on the Arin-Vosdht parts and the whole place, instead of mud and axe-chopped wood planks and horse shit, is all cobble tiles, nice(but small) houses and nice fruit trees and market squares all over the place. Slaves clean up the streets hourly and (Arin-Vosdht/Orc only)Patricians move around in Palanquins carried by slaves. Everything is just so clean, people wear nice robes and tunics, some wear togas except for the laboring class that tend to wear pants and other things like that. The Dwarves shave their beards, or keep them trim. Elves dress the same as everyone else and lack any of the odd arrogance or grace they're said to have, in fact everyone in RiverTown acts like everyone else - oddly restrained seeming, calm, not overwhelmingly violent, and very nervous and fearful of the Arin-Vosdht, with everyone carefully saluting the Militias that still patrol the town - and I do mean militias - there are no Legionnaires. They seem to have a different character than the people of NewForge, who seem more grim and not as - personality-less if that makes sense. 

Ildaberd and Carver were not that interested in exploring the town, following Lemmy's instructions. It's possible to buy some basic charms, luck buffs etc and the like for cheap but nothing major. Some of the merchants feel like charlatans. 

They eventually found a "jester" slave, a Halfling, and they had a conversation with him for a coin. Halflings are typically not treated well in the Empire, but he was able to give them some good information.

- There's been difficulty keeping wizards in the tower. Folk say it's haunted, and the kalKhulmar(mayor/regional governor, literally "littleBigLeader") has thrown up his hands in frustration and offered it to anyone that won't leave in a "Lund-Cursed Week".

- At least seven Wizards have done this so far.

- Nibbles, another slave, was there. This caused Ildaberd to get annoyed/suspicious about the motives of Nibbles(Nibbles is his slave name).

It should be noted that the party had their first followers. Carver his small pack of assassin trainees that he unleashed upon the town to set up a small base somewhere/scout it out and Ildaberd with his spider cult(they are not subtle and dress like this) warrior-volunteers. 

The tower was empty, and the doors openable without keys or locks. As the party approached, it rotated to face them. Going inside, they found a skeleton that was dead with his hand on the door. They poked it and found that it was stuck in place, so began looking around. After absolutely tossing the place up they found a small control panel, and, prying it open, they began to experiment. After both almost killing themselves using poison gas (and actually killing one of the Spider Cultists) and discovering that it is possible to inflict so much pain to a skeleton(a dead thing), it will actually scream, something that shouldn't be possible, they shut off the trap and began to explore in Earnest.

Almost immediately they ran into a Beholder.

Alright, it was a small one, and probably one of the lesser breeds(?), but still dangerous. Of course, Carver had done his prepwork to make sure his arrows were poisoned. So a small battle began, and it was "saves-o-clock" because the party was able to easily defeat it, much to the chagrin of the Illithid creature that was coming to inspect the noise. That was his friend, you monsters! After trying to push a boulder (more like a magically conjured ball) onto the party, it ran ahead after taking a hit (and failing the save) from Carver's poisoned arrow. Not an instant kill, but it did something ridiculous like 25 damage in a single hit, which is absolutely insane for this system. 

There were surprisingly few traps for them, but once the party reached the halfway point, they decided instead of climbing the tower and dealing with every contingency the Illithid would likely have (and basically all of my prep) they decided to go on the balcony at the halfway point, and use a grappling hook, some rope and some damn lucky rolls to just climb all of the way to the top.

Well, okay then. *crumples up notes, tosses them in the garbage* Reaching the top room and finding no Illithid, who had begun to wander/check the lower levels to see if they ran, they entered into the Charting room, the most important room in an Arin-Voshdt built Byzan tower. Ildaberd likes to touch things, so he managed to have a fun conversation with the spirit trapped in the tower, and, making a fun pledge of fealty to the Khulmar(Emperor, literally "big leader") of the entire Byzan Empire, Ildaberd became the Tower's master, a privilege usually for Wizards. What's going on? What is going on

The tower, a spirit being, began the repair/upkeep of itself having permission to do so and the Illithid began to come back to win back his prize - he's dead now. The turn tables and all that - arrows to the face. With this done, the power of a Byzan tower. 

In this world, a 'spell' is just sort of like a schizophrenic projection from the darkest depths of the world. It's not quite the winds of magic from WFRP, but it's similar. It's dark, and it's fucked up below the surface. Shit...tends to bubble up, take form, think clearly, etc. Some of these things are bad, dangerous, evil, and can become what we would call demons. Other things, less awful things, might be like spirits, faeries, but most are just spells. They're invisible, they wander like shades, making weird things happen and wizards can both perceive and take these things and bind them to themselves. Dwarfs got even more aggressive, shattering them and binding them into runes etched into weapons, etc. There's other kinds of magic, what with LUND and SOL the two heavenly bodies seeming to have agendas and blessing people with abilities and such but the main idea mechanically is that spells that we would say are level four, five or six are too dangerous for a wizard to have, doing that is mutations, possessions, exploding into chunks of gore or dissolving into steaming piles of bone - look, just don't do it man.

A tower can be used to cast 1/day spell (randomly rolled for non-Wizards) and that's the main issue for Ildaberd. These can be used anywhere within the same hex or adjacent hexes(really powerful towers can project through what would be called your "area of influence") if that makes any sense.  

Ildaberd also received an offer of ever more power and arcane knowledge through a wall-call (the wall turned into a zoom screen if you know what I mean) from...The Forge of qepHom. Yes, the impractically tall, highly mysterious Arin-Vosdht super structures. An entity in it, a wriggling mass of worms and wires "wearing" a robe invited him to stop on by. He declined, but the entity simply said it wouldn't mind waiting.

Ildaberd was also able to see that Vandus has returned! Leading a war party. Of five others. They were looking like they were probably heading to Kharmlund. Having gained this, the party turned their eyes to...Riverfort, the Byzan-named Fort on the River. Okie dokie. Also, they found some notes that indicated that the last few Wizards that tried to live here had an assistant, a Halfling named Nibbles.

Wait, NIBBLES?

Session 9

LVND STATUS: Perigree, Half-Quarter

Player Characters: Ildaberd, Half-Elf Bard, played by anon.

Aurelius, Half-Orc Fighter, played by anon.

"Carver" played by anon.

NPCS: Nibbles the odd halfling and Lemmy the upgraded torchboy.(cameo)

 So one of those spells was Magic Jar, and there was an idea here to use said Jar to do some awful shit. Ildahberd Jar'd himself, and Carver hopped over the wall of Riverfort at night, having heard that it was controlled by assholes. They learned this from the Mayor, and one of the weirder aspects of Byzan governance came forth. While the cities are clean marvels of engineering, the leadership (kalKhulmar, literally "littlebigleader") had an area of governance that looked more like something out a movie, burning torches, animal skins and half naked serving slaves and all. He was impressed with Ildaberd's moxie and offered him the fort as well (they got the impression that they don't have options) if he could clear out the bandits from that fort. Carver also brought with him expensive wine, which will come in handy later. How they got over the wall is easily, Aurelius watched them and identified a ridiculous amount of gaps in their security. The bandits lack discipline and mostly seem to act out of fear of a wizard stomping around the fort.

They possessed their first dimwitted guard, made him place the jar near the only privy, and then made him "ex-sanguinate" himself at his post. Then the waiting game. They waited a very very very long time, almost till sundown and the rise of LUND but in the end they were able to possess what they assumed was the leader, a gold circlet wearing big man who they took back up to the feasting hall. There, they learned some things - this guy was not the one in charge, and instead it was more that the wizard was in charge. The wizard lacked leadership skills, clout, charisma, whathave you. What he did have was a magical circlet that could cause intense pain and death that he controls on the leader, and the leader, possessed by Ildaberd annoyed him by saying he had some nice fancy (and not poisoned, I swear) wine stashed away. This caused some punishment, and it was so painful to Ildaberd himself he had to save to avoid being thrown out of the man's body, which would have fucked the whole scheme. 

Otherwise, things went off okay. The wizard did go to the "stash" and greedily took the wine, which was a nice halfling vintage a decade old - they don't make wine anymore so it's rarity and deliciousness tipped the scales from smart to greedy in the bastard. The poison killed him, he failed the save but flicked the kill switch for the circlet, which didn't bother Ildaberd much, because while it hurt like hell, the leadership was dead. With the watchman discovered (and the two dead leaders discovered) Carver disguised himself, slipped in looted the wizard's corpse. He found a key which opened a room in the main keep, where the wizard slept and kept all of the loot, the fucker. While he barricaded himself in for the night (because loot important) Ildaberd used a mixture of this spell and complete and utter sociopathy to make a fuckin' horror movie happen, and by the dawn, all of the bandits had died and fled. And most of the ones that died had killed themselves after positioning itself in such a way that they would fall into a mass grave. Spooky! 

With that out of the way and that was 60% of the session, resolving downtime, the bridge across the River was now safe and back under civilization's hands again, thank the gods. Ildaberd swore another Oath of Fealty to the Khulmar again and off he went, because one of the things learned and wanted to know more about was Nibbles. So it was back to Lester's Folly. 

They used one of their gemstone wands set up for them, and, emerging into their first house, they found evidence their trap was working - a recently dead thief with a hand that was bloated and blacked from poison in front of their vault lying there. Since Lemmy was chillin' here, holding the fort down, they had him dispose of the corpse and stepped outside looking for Nibbles. First of course there was some religious issues - Dwarves in this setting do not like spiders and the Spider Cult is getting much much much more brazen about their imagery. Ildaberd calmed the situation and decided he needed to rebrand the cult somewhat. He ordered them to move into Riverfort and leave Lester's Folly, and then finally, he entered the local tavern and found Nibbles, prepped and ready for an adventuring session. They asked him about the tower. Nibbles ran away. There was a short chase through the city and they managed to capture him and have a quick conversation.

So here's what they learned - 

• Yes, Nibbles was a slave to whoever ran the tower, and found it somewhat freeing since the tower mostly maintains itself and none of the wizards last long.
• Nibbles had seen many halflings disappear into Kharmlund, and some of those were important to him. The only lead he had is they were being taken to the "King of the Dwarves" and so he joined expeditions hoping someone would lead him there. 
• The Arin-Vosdht conquest of the Halflings and their lands was not entirely a military one. They came nearby, built a tower and then used one of the great secrets of Byzan's military might - they issued a charter. Think of it like a spell, a ritual spell that requires: a tower, blood of the first Khulmar, and other things not known, and they essentially get to simply issue word of command to reality. Nibbles remembers fighting a long protracted guerilla war against the Empire, and at the exact same time he remembers losing in a really pointless "risk it all" field battle battle, his people clapped in irons and his lands destroyed. He has no idea how to do these things just that they were done to the Halflings, and it's likely true that they were done to other races conquered. Would the nobles of the human lands of Galdrou give up their privilege, power and status to become bland milksops that grow to a green foot? They did. Why did they? Nibbles believes that's why. 
• He has no idea what the forges are, what their purpose is etc. 

 

Nibbles was mollified that the party didn't want to kill them, and Ildaberd even hired him to help him with the tower and understanding it - as an equal.

 The final event from this session is the party was visited by a wizard from the few-days-ride-from-here Citadel of the Scholars, who demanded that Ildaberd surrender the keys to the tower (keys?) and fuck off. Ildaberd refused, mostly, but the hot-headed wizard(the eighth such wizard) was not having it and said he would return with their army/militia and take the tower, before teleporting away.

 What a session! Next time the party resolved to return to Kharmlund and do more dungeon crawling(I did confirm it would take a few sessions before the "mass battle" event would even happen.

 - Klang

Kharmlund 7: The Black Widow~

 Another week, another adventure in the depths of the Dwarfen? Dwarven? The nightmarish place known as....KHARMLUND! Today was a regular player count.

LVND STATUS: Perigree, Full

Player Characters: Ildaberd, Half-Elf Bard, played by anon.

Aurelius, Half-Orc Fighter, played by anon.

"Carver" played by anon.

NPCS: Nibbles the odd halfling and Lemmy the upgraded torchboy. 

Begin

The players began with a new roll on the town events table. It turns out the goddamn mercenaries are in town. This is the free company of the Ninth Legion Deserters, the IXLD, and they are one of the many companies that spread out like locusts from the (recently compromised) lands of the Mayson-Vosdht(or Men, as they call themselves). The Empire sort of just...abandoned their conscripts there to deal with "the northern threat" and refused to elaborate, leaving behind instructions to disband return home in the middle of a rebellion pacification campaign. This did not happen.  Our heroes opened up looking for Lemmy to hire him on a simple job - but they found him starry-eyed, talking to Ambrosius Klange, who was selling Lemmy on the grand idea that he could get rich quick in the Mercenary life. Ildaberd met Klange, and then after a brief introduction, saw him out. It was time to get to business. Lemmy was given an assignment - he was to go to the nearby Byzantown and get information, lodgings, etc. Lemmy took the job with gusto, mostly because Ildaberd gave him 500gp. Now that's loot! 

Then Ildaberd realized Turk wasn't "turk" anymore, and had adopted a new name and persona. Turns out "Turk" had an important reason to get a new face and name. 

After this, Ildaberd and his "new" friend went to go check out this Spider Cult he joined a few months ago as a result of a carousing table. It was an open house at the temple, and basically, I just read the opening monologue to "Black Widow" by Alice Cooper, to properly illustrate how weird and fucked up this cult was. Ildaberd, not to be worried about this, heard the promise of magical items and signed up. Basically, bringing the cult horrible poisonous spiders = free stuff, and the party remembered there was a floating orb filled with spiders in a room they'd chosen to not fuck with. Well, now, that's a floating orb of money, so, off to Kharmlund it's time to go.

I also forgot to mention they got a bounty system going - 500 gp for "scalps" of Kurgan's men. Problem is, the rune that identifies them as Kurgan's men disappears upon death. The party did manage to figure out to prevent that, and then instead of turning in one "scalp", decided to kill...more..Also, they were able to steal the scalps from the big battle at the end of session six. So, the party headed to Kharmlund and descended into the dungeon, beelining for NewForge for money and fun. I've had too many asshole DMs just go "uhhh no uhhhh I never said that..." or try to take away the money someone could earn as a way to "balance"(lol) a co-op game based off imagination with no real stakes, but I usually make things "stop working" after someone gets an exploit. If you figure out a good hole in my logic, I'll let you exploit it...once, then the hole will usually close, because otherwise it risks not becoming a game. 

Yoki was pleased to see the scalps and paid enormous amounts of money for them, even more for the secret to preventing the runes from vanishing. The party debated discussing what to do next, return the gold or continue one (it was a lot of gold). Carver's player asked me if say, someone owned property in Newforge it would count as "safe" and I answered yes, because Carver owns property in Newforge, and don't you ask why that populist leader of the plebian faction was dead or where Carver's disguise kit and potion of invisibility or rare poisons went! Don't worry about it. So after dumping gold (and splitting with Aurelian) and taking a new level around the board, the party went to the "horrible Spider Orb" room and got themselves some spiders. I'll not bore you with the details, it involved a sack and some careful planning. Then Carver revealed they could return the spiders easily, and also that they could simply use his gemstone wand he acquired on his downtime to pop back to Lester's Folly. Ildaberd didn't have any issue with that, and went back. They traded the deeply poisonous spiders for some magic items and used the same wand to pop back to Newforge. After this, the party just went around exploring various rooms and kicking them open. In older bat-reps I'd described each one, but the party is so confident that they've gone from exploring 1-3 rooms to around 10 each session. That means this turns into a huge essay, so I'll summarize the important points, because my god, I don't want to write a 5k word essay every single session. The most important thing they got from the spider cult is the rank of "priest" which gives Ildaberd an escort of cultists when he desires it, and Carver leveled up to be able to recruit assassins. Also a magic sword that allows the wielder to speak to and command spiders.

Main highlights of exploration:

- They found a massive pit in the ground where a massive creature, stalk-eyes seen, asked for "tasty" food. Didn't want the ratmen fed to it - no soul, no flavor. Wanted humans. Big claw as well seen, but otherwise, not murderous. Good(?!).

 - They went back to the area where they fought and grappled with a Moon-haunted lantern wielding man. They had set the room on fire beforehand to deal with spiders, and checked using the Spider-sword. No spiders. With this out of the way, the party encounter the Gemlatinous Cube, a massive cube-like thing that rolls like a big..block obstacle from mario. Made out of gems, skin seemingly inpenetrable, the party fled after it nearly smushed poor nibbles. The GemCubes followed them out, smashing the wall and door down, making a lot of noise (three wandering monster checks no hits) and finally falling to Draconir's mighty blows from Aurelian. They found the "core" from intuition, scooped up all of the gems, and left the "normal" way back to Lester's folly, on Thomas the Dwarf's wagon. 

Good adventures so far. For downtime, they decided to "pimp" out the lower levels of their house, building a secret basement, with some special safes for carrying their loot, and a meeting room for Carver's new assassins. It was not cheap - I personally add a "and 20% more than that if you want it to stay secret" tax to secret things like this - and then we ended the session. 

Can't wait to see what stupid shit they do with their new underlings now!

Kharmlund 6: The party meets the hate wall and deals with their first Moon-Haunted encounter. And..the battle of the entrance!

Once again, the party enters Kharmlund! Why this time, you ask? Well, it certainly won't be to talk to people, that's for sure! Having met the desperate Imperials of NewForge the party decided it wanted more money, fast.

So, without much delay Kharmlund 6: The party meets the hate wall and deals with their first Moon-Haunted encounter. And..the battle of the entrance!

Our Players...

Ildaberd played by anon

Turk played by anon

Nibbles - DMPC

Lemmy - DMPC

Lemmy has done ever better for himself, spending all of the "chaff" money (which is still a lot but dismissed by the party as having no value) on some basic arms and armor. He's basically a base level hireling, and that's pretty good for what was effectively a torchboy. Nibbles is unchanging and strange, his weapons and clothing always spotless (rumors say he spends hours on this), but always odd and mysterious. Ildaberd has many questions! 

The party went deep into the depths of Kharmlund this time, north of mighty NewForge and discovered some interesting things, many of which they absolutely refused to touch. The bloody cowards! Since there was a lot criss-crossing and back-tracking in this session, I decided to draw an arrow of the party's progress, because they did a loop here. This won't be 100% accurate but it will be close enough.

 

The order of party movement is Red - > Yellow -> Blue -> Purple -> Green

RED

The party decided to strike out in a different direction than before. Entering into the large area, they found it mostly empty except for a chest on a small island, surrounded by bubbling green liquid. So, they roped the chest and yanked it off, which caused the (unlocked) chest to noisily spill its contents all over the room. The subsequent divvying up of coins was interrupted by people hiding right to the south. It's a simple "bait and ambush" operation by some of Kurgan's men. The party used entangle and murdered them all in short order. Good stuff, to be honest. Can't let bandits start pushing you around. 

After this, the party continued to the south before running into a repeating dart trap. Lemmy made his save by 1(one) number and managed to block the insta-killing poison dart with his shield. 

YELLOW

After waiting a full ten minute time block for it to stop firing, they shrugged and moved around to find a way to shut it off. They didn't find one, but they managed to find a cache of gold, and green wins out over caution.

BLUE

Not to be deterred, Lemmy and his small shield were recruited to lead the way, as it was determined that the darts were firing down three corridors. They pushed all of the way to the far right of the three hallway chamber, plugged the arrow, causing a buildup of ammo, and ultimately a jam. They were then attacked by their first moon-haunted: an eyeless man with a lantern who shrieked loudly when his lantern glazed against them as they leapt around a corner to avoid this. The shrieking caused more moon-haunted, the ones with obsidian black eyes, to peel off the walls around them and attack. Ildaberd, trapped in a corridor and with nothing else to do, fired his lighting rod wand at them. It did exactly what it needed, but then bounced back and killed Ildaberd - with a save - and he was forced to use one of the five mellinated man confections he bought in the first session. He spoke briefly to the same wight that sold them to him, which cheerfully warned him that he had four things left - and then he would be theirs.

Then they fled into a room where they found another wall-face. This one, speaking only in text appearing on the wall, told them it had a quest: kill yourselves. It also began to angrily quote AM from I have no mouth and must scream so the party shrugged and moved on. No gold, no glory. They followed a path and emerged into the starting room, having found their first major shortcut. 

PURPLE

At that, they went to the northwest in search of gold. Exploring rooms, the party found a dead wizard surrounded by skeletons.

The party responded with a resounding "hell no", and then entered into an open room, to find their first wandering adventurer group. These guys were hauling a massive statue out of the room - solid gold. There was an extremely tense minute where the party deliberated robbing them - they chose not to. They allowed them to leave with that beautiful gold statue worth 2500 gp! Crazy, these adventurers. 

 Finally they checked out the south-western part of the revealed maps. There, they found some ratmen drilling into a wall in the room there. A simple use of a sleep scroll dealt with that, and then the party found the switch to open the secret door to the room the Ratmen were trying to dig into. 

They found their first gemstone wand and statue, alongside a ruby gem in one of the Ratmen's pouches. With this find, and unlocking their own fast travel system, the party decided they had done more than enough and headed back. The gold take was okay, but the real win was the wands. On the way out, they caught up to the rival adventurers, current in battle with some of Kurgan's men over the statue. Hiding out of sight, the battle between the NPCs generated enough noise to summon a battle group of ratmen, and the NPC party lost two, but managed to barely make it. The players followed them up and pinched the gemstone statue in the entrance. 

Awkward cart ride back home, but at least the PCs had managed to get their own fast travel system working!

So, here's the awkward question, but how many games did you play this year?

 I struggled with writing a funny preamble for this, but since the beginning of last year, I decided to try and get down just how much I actually played games and really tried to beat the forces of laziness and novelty to try and get as many games of Battletech as I possibly could in. I also decided to just sort of record every game I played and what that has led to is a hell of a lot of extra game time. It turns out gamifying playing games helped me want to play more games. Laziness and Novelty are the hobbyists greatest fears - there's always a Cool New Thing to buy - Warhammer: The Old World is coming out next year and I can't say I'm not tempted, but with 200+ models to paint including and entire Skaven and Cities of Sigmar army, I don't really have the ability to justify any more Warhammer (or any hobby stuff) that isn't outside of more art supplies, novels etc. Models have to go away for awhile, doubly so since I'm also waiting for my Torch and Shield rewards, which will be dumping a massive set of Dungeon Tiles onto my lap along with 30+ dwarfs and I think like 20 monsters. 

Anyway, here's the games I played this year with number of times played, dates omitted for privacy protections:

Battletech(Classic): 8 games

Battletech(Alpha Strike): 8 games

Mechwarrior Destiny: 4 sessions (DM)

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: 6 sessions (DM)

Cyberpunk RED: Two sessions (player)

Space Weirdos (3 Games)

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar (2 games)

Blood Bowl (3 Games)
Dungeon Bowl (2 Games)
Blood Bowl 7's (1 game)

War of the Ring (2 games)

Inis (4 games, I have no idea how to play INIS)

Return to Dark Tower (2 games) 

Escape the Dark Castle (1 game)

MESBG - (2 games)

OSE (6 games, DM)

Torch and Shield (3 games)

Warcry (2 games)

The Dwarves (1 game)

This is a marked improvement for me, since I only played three games in total in 2022, and they were literally just Battletech teaching games. So my goal of 2023 was basically, "Play a shitload more of the games you have." and I have succeeded tremendously.

That being said, I bought way too many god-damned miniatures this year, so it's going to be time to paint all of them....it's only 908 miniatures.....

If you are in the OSR and you're interested in trying a Wargame, you should be looking at Torch and Shield [COREBOOK REVIEW]

 If you're following this blog (lol) then you may have seen my previous impressions post on the technically released game Torch and Shield. Released to backers(of which I was literally the first, which was kind of neat to find out) yesterday in PDF format, I have torn through it with the intensity of a starving man trying to open a tin can with his teeth. AND....

This game is really good, and if that's all you need, you can simply walk on from here.

The Full Game

Let's do a little recap before we get going here. In Torch and Shield, you play as either one of three(more incoming) rival clans of Dwarves(or a generic clan), and as that clan, you assemble a "crew" of Dwarves and delve into the lost Holds. Each game is basically at the pain point where you and a rival crew meet, demand the other one back off, refuse, and then battle it out for treasure. Defeated dwarves are either killed outright(rare) or they're injured(common) and you record these injuries, deaths and victories. Dwarves can rank up and become powerful heroes, breaking the generation rules of Torch and Shield and allowing you to have things that wouldn't be 'legal' at crew creation.  So if you've played Mordheim, it's very, very similar. To the OSR people, that might be less familiar, so let me go further as to why you should give it a try:

Here Be Monsters

Doing battles in what is effectively one of many "Morias" is a good way to make noise, and yes, once the battle begins, you will be facing potentially attacks from various hordes of monsters every single turn. There's several kinds and they have an excellent "A.I." system inside of them, with actions chosen based on factors like if they have someone in line of sight etc. This typically makes the game much harder than expected. Monsters do better when they're in darkness (more on that below) and also have an easier time spawning when they're in darkness, but this is also based on various what's going on in the scenario. Monsters have no allies but there's some fun rules about Dwarf honor, two dwarves fighting to the death will allow their enemy to engage the enemies of dwarfkind without punishing them. Monsters also don't just generically attack, they may instead just try to pull you away to their entrances, found at least once in every scenario. So I mentioned Darkness...

Let There Be Light

You need to equip your crew like a DnD party - specifically an OSR party, so making sure you have light sources is tantamount. There's two stages of a "tile" in Torch and Shield. One is simple - it's illuminated or it's shrouded. One dwarf must be the bearer of the source, torch or lanterns, and yes in true OSR fashion you can risk it all and throw it at people and set them on fire, at which point they become a light source. You can also become "soaked" with water and have it go out, or have it become extinguished by a random event and so on and so on. Light travels in eight tiles in every direction and your enemy's torches light you too. Not being in the light means you're "shrouded" and being in darkness has an average chance of nothing happening. Then there's a higher chance of a certain type of enemy spawning and killing you. You can also just straight up die, being grabbed by something in the dark. This is a HUGE part of the game, and there's a reason it clicked to me that the OSR might be interested in this. 

Battles

Gameplay is really simple. Your stats determine how far you move, how easy it is to do damage, etc. Players draw cards = number of crew and an extra if you have a leader every turn and you activate based on the number/nobility on the card. Leaders can "sheathe" a card to save for later turns, but no leader = no sheathe. Then it's pretty easy to extrapolate - combat is phased, so move, attacks, resolve successful attacks, draw from the event deck to see if something really bad happens to you or not. Missions typically have different objectives but it's not really about a straight deathmatch (naturally you can play it that way) especially with monsters spawning in to kill you both. 

Crews

The Crew creation rules are pretty simple. You won't be rolling for stats in this game, as the "profiles"(stat blocks) will be the same for each dwarf starting out. There's some different "types" of Dwarves, from a "Greyshield(leader)" dwarf to a "shortbeard(grunt)" dwarf. Again, this is pretty typical of most wargames, and naturally these guys can advance from lowly grunts to powerful heroes - assuming they survive. There's three kinds of Dwarves as mentioned and they bring their own special types of Dwarves, berserkers, knights, gunslingers and everything in between. If a dwarf is still standing at the end of a game, he gets an advancement point(basically XP) and after 6 of those are accrued, he becomes the next "level" of it, so shortbeards become Clansmen, clansmen become thanes, and thanes become greybeards. Clan specific dwarves just get another "trait" which is basically a "talent" that adds something good. The hero Dwarves are able to do fun things like upgrade their weapons to Baduraz steel or buy lavish displays of wealth for themselves to intimidate other dwarves. Dwarves can also equip maps, keys, dwarven ale that offers buffs and more! It's got a very in-depth character creation system and despite that, I was able to, after reviewing the rules easily create a crew.

Campaigns

This is the meat and potatoes of the game. While Torch and Shield is perfectly serviceable as a standalone battle game it lives and dies on it's campaign. Campaigns are as described above - you get levels and treasure for surviving, more for winning, so it's not entirely a winner takes all situation. Often, it does depend entirely on the scenario, and there's also co-op scenarios. Caught in a death spiral? If your crew is so beat to hell that you can't do a proper scenario anymore, you can do a raid mission in order to make money (you have to win, though). It's entirely possible to lose and lose and lose so hard you have to basically disband the crew and start again. Painful, sure, but if you're used to loss in the RPG world this shouldn't hurt you too hard. Likewise, success in your ventures will lead to leveling up. You can also end a mission at anytime, cutting and running with no punishment - you will still get your 3 gold for trying but you don't fuck over the other side. As for injuries, this is pretty simple, you either die, miss the next game, start with less health, or you're fine. It is possible to get killed instantly, taking three damage in a single hit - this kills the Dwarf outright(unless a fortune point is spent). They have stated leveling options, and injury options, will become more in depth in the future. The rules mentions at least once dwarves missing limbs, so....

 

Once you and another crew can scrape twenty coins together, you enter a trio of scenarios. These are very difficult - once you complete all three(in a row), you take what's left of your bedraggled crew and battle for title of King Under the Mountain, and that's the basic, core campaign. New campaigns are promised in the future. 

 

Finishing up

Good game. Very fun, easy to learn, lots of campaign stuff. It's more complicated than Battle Companies or Warcry, but doesn't have as much stuff as Mordheim or Blood Bowl, getting a nice medium between the two. An absolute gem of an indie game. Ever Deeper, dawi!

Devlog: The BPC system

 The most important stage for the development of a forever DM is the development of their own weird pet system that's objectively better than any commercial option. If you don't do something like this, you're probably not cut out to be a game designer. 

Anyway without further ado, let's talk about...

The Bones Picked Clean System!

With a lot of work and careful thinking, I've managed to begin to cobble together 2/3rds of the BPC system, a (forever free) system neutral game where you, the players, will enjoy a campaign-based TTRPG miniatures game. This is very much a hideous mix of the original "Ten Dead Rats" game, with lots of work to make it even weirder - it also uses a mixture of "Hail Caesar/Warmaster" and "MESBG" and other games. 

The purpose was to make the game that allows you to easily and without a ton of math, be able to swap from a character in a typical (rules lite) tabletop RPG to a skirmish wargaming profile and then finally a 10mm massive battle profile on top of that. And then back and forth. Other systems, like ACKS, do this as well, but holy shit there's too much bullshit going on there. So much crunch. And there's other mass battle systems but man, they suck. I will never again purchase an RPG that offers stronghold gameplay and then it's like "oh just roll some d10s and you win the battle". 

Enter mighty Cona- I mean the BPC system, which is there to resolve all of this. It's also (I personally believe) flexible enough to be a way for players to also do something a little Dwarf Fortress-y or Dungeon Keeper-y. You want to be a bunch of Dogs of War-type mercs? The BPC system has you good. Or so I like to believe. No, I know with a capital K. It's going to be a masterpiece for anyone with a lot of miniatures. 

Anyway, that's all for now, just the introduction. Kharmlund #6 will be up in a week or so. 

Kharmlund 5: Loredumping and Munchkinery, meeting the Byzan of Newforge.

It's another day before Kharmlund once again begins play, and I continue to be extremely late on my session reports. This session report in particular is for a session from almost exactly two weeks ago, but I just haven't had the time or interest in updating it. Mostly it's the fact that I didn't get the map for the players updated at this time. 

Anyway, Kharmlund 5: Loredumping and Munchkinery.

Our Players...

Ildaberd played by anon.

Turk played by anon.

Talci, played by my girlfriend. 

Nibbles - DMPC

Lemmy - DMPC.

Begin

The party began by assembling as they do. Carousing tables all, and mostly bad things. Talci's absence was explained by being turned into a pig for the last two months and now a little annoyed at the whole affair. Turk accidentally burned down a tavern, and Ildaberd joined a spider cult.

Fun.

They also were joined by Nibbles and Lemmy, Nibbles dressed well and about the same as before, and Lemmy now kitted out like he'd been reading the Byzan equivalent of Soldier of Fortune Magazine, so picture equipment with too many slots, useless ornamentation on the hilts of weapons, things like that. His entire loot spent, he needed to go back in there. Guy needed to get himself, I dunno, a scope for his crossbow he was definitely going to buy one day. 

Into Kharmlund

Party made it to Kharmlund just fine, and then decided to forgo much searching and to look for an entrance to "Newforge", the bastion of Byzan power in here since the forges fell. And they didn't have to look far, since they'd accidentally found an entrance (near the spider orb of hell room, just south and a little bit west from the tiny goblin brewery) to the underground settlement.

Traveling there without issue, the party were accosted by guards hiding behind false walls, spears pointed at them like a thicket. They explained they were adventurers and that they'd heard Yoki, the Legate of Newforge was looking for skilled adventurers, and such. 

After some discussion, they were allowed in, warned they'd be getting watched by the Vulpes- the Wolves, think secret police, elite scout, etc of the Byzan army, but could explore freely. 

I've provided a map of Newforge below. The party, before running into anything resembling the Legate's quarters, found a fairly squat, bunk-heavy area of underground rooms filled with working peasantry, grim soldiers, quiet slaves, busy workers. They found evidence of piped in running water, free to anyone who needed, and they found evidence of, at the very least, semi-frequent cropcrowing, although very similar to the kind of fare you'd see in Dwarf Fortress. The Arin-Vosdht(Orcs) were getting used to mushrooms, it seems! 

 

 

And then off they went to Yoki's quarters. Yoki is, despite being the head of a primarily Orcish settlement, as the Byzan empire are Orcs, a human male fighter, the chaddiest of race/class combos. Yoki lives in a very, very nice place and it's right next to a heavily guarded door, and among a massive pile of treasure, magic items, and Kharmlundian curios. A friendly chap, he took the invitation more seriously and assumed the party was there for some free citizenship in the (still, for now, who knows) largest Empire there was and ever had been. 

Now it's important to understand why a human would simp for the Byzan, and why that's so odd. Here's some facts about the great Byzan empire. 

When they conquer an area, they typically rename the people from whatever they call themselves, to a version of themselves in their own tongue. So the Dwarves are called Basht-Vodsht, or, "Mountain-Men" and so on. Most people chafe under this, but they really chafe under the nightmare construct known as the Byzantown, which is a multicultural society free of hate*, in these places, the various peoples are placed, given jobs, educations (careers typically useful to Byzan military needs like engineers) and stripped of useful identities. Voshdt(people) are typically allowed to choose parts of their own leader, but make no mistake, every Byzantown is run by a Legate(military governor, basically), which reports directly to the people in the Capitals of Arin, the homelands of the Orcs. That's not a typo, there's been some issues on where the real centers of power are, now that the forges have fallen. 

Yoki is the first human Legate, and he earned this position by leading a hundred and twenty five Arin-Vosdht survivors: slaves, plebs, patricians, etc from the smoking ruins of the qephom forge as it was cursed five years ago. He took them to Kharmlund, and helped settle it, keep it safe, and organized, and was generally well-liked enough that the Patricians finally decided that race-gating(in this one instance) the levers of power was maybe not the vibe, as the zoomers say. 

Yoki is understandably one of the first people to actually benefit from more than the cleanliness, law and order (cue Life of Brian scene here) and actually see his ambition rewarded, and he's full-on on the Empire train now. He expects that this crisis will end, the forges will be un-cursed, and a new, changed empire will lead the Voshdt of the world into a new empire.

The party almost unanimously decided he's a retard, so I may have not done a good job of showing that Yoki does have a point, since, if a system rewards you immensely, even if it sucks, you tend to support the system. When asked about the Forgecursing, Yoki had no information for the party. He was there, shit went bad almost instantly, and the few scraps of information he could muster means that it's world(when Yoki says world, he means Empire) wide. There is also talk of an "invasion" far to the north, from beyond the icewalls that, as legend tell, sealed around the lands that are known. Who knows?  The point is, help isn't coming, and Yoki is looking to become the help for everyone else. This empire isn't dead yet damn it, and even if he has to declare himself Khulmar(Emperor) well he um haha nevermind that last part. 

He gave them more information on the various other major factions that populate Kharmlund. 

First, there's Kurhgan, the Bandit king. He definitely is the guy resetting and laying new traps everywhere, and he does want any and all magical items. An attempt to raid him with a war party lead to what I described to the players as "dungeon vietnam". The guy is entrenched and only his men know the tripwires. Killing Kurgan and bringing back his head? That's how you get the massive treasure hoard he had in his quarters. 

Ratmen are an unknown. They swarm and they attempted to destroy the Newforge once. The attack lasted nearly half a year, with seemingly endlessly replensished chittering ratmen swarming but also literally incapable of learning tactics of any kind whatsoever. But the endless numbers worked against them under a Vulpes agent was able to turn them against each other - with absurd ease, I might add, and the attack fell apart in hours. 

The tainted area is a nightmare hellzone. Every single faction, as far as Newforge knows, has sealed it off in some form or fashion. It's filled to the brim with moon-haunted, people cursed into the mad slaves of Lund, the moon(the moon is evil in this setting). There's been attempts to purge it - these have never worked. They take prisoners. Those prisoners then show up as more moon haunted. It's a problem. They can't be reasoned with. They are innately hateful. Communication seems impossible.

There's some discussion with them about heart theory, something that the Solarguard believe in - they claim that Lund-tainted areas are controlled by these odd things called hearts, and destroying them removes the taint. They also believe that hearts exist every where, buy Yoki reminds the party that the Solarguard were, before the cursing of the forges, a bunch of religious extremists the Empire was "getting around to" exterminating before bigger issues arrived. He also has a massive lump of Solargold in his study, and the party did mention that Vandus would likely be returning in search of it, since he was interested overall. Yoki also attempted to pay the party to kill someone who was rousing up the workers, forming something called a "union" but the party wasn't interested. 

Talci wished to speak to a moon-haunted. It was not really useful, they look like the moon-burnt, but their eyes are replaced with obsidian polished black orbs that constantly leak blood(?) and they jabbered incoherently, seeming to know Talci but having no ability to communicate what that meant or why. Then the party realized they'd spent basically the entire session more or less grilling someone like it was a goddamn bethesda game and needed to make some money, so they decided to go smash up the goblin brewery. Why the fuck not? Although, smash up isn't the right word.

Basically in an act of extremely based DnD play, the party drilled a hole in the door, stuck a magic stave through, and fired a lightning bolt into it. Since the room is half the size of the projectile, they barbequed everything inside, took the gold and left Kharmlund about 300 or so GP richer.

Christ on a cracker. It took five sessions to turn them into literal sociopaths. 

There was some leveling once they made it to the settlement of Lester's Folly safely and I closed the book on a session that had more roleplaying than I've ever seen in a game of DnD. 

Anyway, until next time, cheers!

 

*by the point of a sword. You will not be racist against elves, Dwarf, or you will be hang from a gibbet.