Mike Mearls does not understand B/X or OSE

 

I was merely enjoying a proper mountainous lunch of cheese, meat, bread, cheese, meat, beer, beerr cheese and meat with some bread on the side when upon scrolling the ol' timeline I happened upon the X account of a man named Mike Mearls, of some repute or disrepute. Please understand goin' forward that I'm not interested in commenting on his pre-pandemic reputational woes and curious associations with some people, but rather this completely horrific post he made about adding complexity to the best of the old 70's Dungeon Games, the basic/expert rules (and OSE).

I've been running OSE bi-weekly, with very few stops except for being sick or holidays that supercede the important Dungeon Game, and even though I stopped writing battle reports (they were too much work, and thusly, I renamed this blog), I can tell you we're at session 30~ and are taking a quick break, as the domain play stuff requires a lot more work and the players wanted to try some Mork and Borg, a simpler game with less procedure. The reason I tell you this, umgi, is because I don't really mind what type of DnD you play. I play various versions of the Dungeon Game, and this single-page-of-rules game is a good palette cleanser for the next chapter of the Kharmlund(now call Lunaralia) campaign, because we're full on into domain play going forward: leading armies, handling diplomacy, and finally - to my horror - leaving the starting hex as the spider-god worshipping half elf Ildaberd prepares to make good on his plan to march on the Capitals and claim the Empty Throne, becoming the 9th Khulmar and assuming control over the crumbling and in disarray Byzan Empire!

Uhh, what was I talking about? Oh right - Mike Mearls. Let's talk these tweets.

 

I'm already worried. Maneuvers. Continue Mike.

Ah.

These are horrible, horrible ideas for Basic/OSE. The mechanics themselves are fine - they are good mechanics for the kind of game that Mearls wants to play - which is not BOSE. Mike wants to play something more akin to 4e, or maybe Dungeon Crawl Classics, since he makes this baffling comment about the "chaos" of OSE/B/X:

So let's just make something clear - in terms of raw chaos, there's very little inside the intended play session of BX/OSE, it's just not there. Spells are largely deterministic, with set and specific outcomes (some spells have random tables, but this is not dungeon crawl classics or WFRP where random effects are rolled on a table frequently). Combat is very tightly ordered and despite my proscription against telling players stats of monsters, you can immediately tell, especially until level 5-6, exactly what an encounter is going to do, most of the time. Lots of low-level monsters are bugs, beasts, humanoids with no special abilities(maybe 1) and there's no chaos there outside of the normal play.

So, with adding "maneuvers" from more modern systems into BX: you can do it, but it defeats the point. With zero irony, just play something like 4e or maybe one of those RPG/Wargame hybrids(they are fucking awesome), since you don't really seem interested in playing a game without combat. I've run 30 sessions of this BOSE campaign, and it has happened that we've gone months without actually rolling initiative - the players commenting on how long it's been since they had to actually, uh, fight someone despite plundering tombs filled with monsters. How weird! 

So while I say you can do it - it completely misses the point: combat is not something you really want to get into in BOSE, and more importantly, the fighter is already fantastically equipped to handle it if you simply must fight dudes. They get the best saves, the most health, access to any weapon, any piece of armor (and with these two, the highest amount of magic items), and rapid level progression - the fighter may not be fancy, but he is reliable. The hank hill of adventuring parties. He might be boring, but he's the one that gets you out of scrapes.

That doesn't mean you should fight dudes, most people that survived the adventuring profession in the Dungeon Game didn't survive it if they simply chose to Engage The Enemy at every chance - that was how you died. It's video game shit to shrug at 30 goblins attacking you, something that should immediately cause you to shit your pants and run screaming in the opposite direction. In modern systems, you just activate your turnabouts while making sure you have enough verse tokens while spending your hope and luck and fate and valor and fortune while making sure you fear and doom and rage and bane and disadvantage doesn't go too high. In BOSE, killing 30 goblins is, "I knew there was a reason I didn't use those two sleep scrolls and you call kept screaming at me to use it on the minotaur well look who is laughing now assholes" and in modern games it's a warmup. I don't even mind these kinds of games and I have played them and I like them. However. In a game where the reaction roll, the light of a torch, and the caution of a player massively change how the game is played and how encounters go out. My players have toppled bandit kings, screeching hordes of skaven and more by learning how to speak to - then manipulate them. The Skaven are self-defeatingly paranoid and stupid? That's a weapon. The bandits are so gold and glory hungry they'll walk into an obvious trap? That's a weapon. It makes monsters so much more interesting in BOSE - it's also a big part of the roleplaying.

I see a lot of RPGs that get advertised that basically just try to make you play more like BOSE by forcing stuff that seems fairly obvious and comes out naturally into mechanics. They'll go "in THIS rpg, monsters are MORE than just stat blocks, they have LINKS in a CHAIN that you can BREAK to make them FRIEND or FOE and figuring that out requires you to use your abilities, like your SLEUTH tokens" or whatever. That stuff was already there. The fighter is capable of pulling off some crazy shit with just "attacking and defending", and I would know, I gm'd a section where a single fighter (with a magic sword and set of plate) held off a teeming horde of Skaven off, backing up every time and buying the party time to make it to the teleport out of the dungeon with their stolen magic items (of vital importance to the ratmen). As he finally broke and ran, he picked up the poisonous gas bomb he'd found in their lair as swarms of rusty spears cut him up, and nearly killed them, tossed it, and teleported out, killing almost all of them. All of that was just him doing cool shit, but mechanically it was just a basic attacking and movement set of rules. Maybe I could have made that more possible by adding in Steer The Narrative tokens that allowed him to use the Gas Bomb ability, but he'd had better watch out because that moves the party up the Ruin track and they'll need to spend a Repose to Clear Down their Ruin or the GM will be able to spend that to unlock a Hefty challenge (rated such because it can cause three Surges worth of damage), thankfully he was able to Jaunt out of there as the Door to the Maze of Adventure was met and the players could simply declare the dungeon cleared as they'd gotten enough Keys from using their Scrutiny spends.

And again, listen, I don't mind those things, and I'm not offended by the silly games that do them. I've played many of them over the last two years and I like them - but they're not BOSE. Because my players also defeated a bandit king obsessed with power by convincing him to put on a cursed diadem that enslaved them to the party by playing their cards right. They've been not so keen on pitched battles but used an old plague-afflicted stone to drop it into the enemy camp's water supply. They've managed to broker alliances with powerful, dangerous, violent people, all through trickery and other things. And that's the kind of stories B/X was built on. Conan didn't just charge in and start killing people. He was a smart guy. So building games where a guy can kill 30 goblins with stupid extra, pointless mechanics just aren't the 1970's Dungeon Game. They're something else - and so is whatever Mike is trying to turn BOSE into. You can play them if you want, but...my dude? That's not BOSE. That's something else. Just play 4e man. It's a great game, and it's honestly where you seem to want to be. 

On Dwarves

Note: The following piece of lore is written from the perspective of a Byzan Empire merchant who has traveled around a bit and knows some things. There are always biases in every telling and not everything here must be taken as truth. ***

Purpose:

Suppose you're working a project. Likely, you're from a village too poor to have slaveholders and you're in charge of building, let's say, a bridge. This bridge doesn't need to be much - it just needs to be larger than the felled tree people have been using for a couple decades - the tree did a fine job - but it's just not quite what the merchant class needs to bring goods to you. So you're probably the most learned member of the village, and you're beginning to get the work started with a crew of volunteers when you're tapped on the shoulder. You turn around and look at a man, maximum height five foot nothing, round like a boulder, arms bristling with muscle, beard down past his knees and wearing some kit that looks like it was harvested from a motely of large insects. He asks you what you're doing. As you begin to explain you're making a proper bridge for your town he seems to enter into something of a trance, then begins grumbling and pushes past you, tsk-tsking at your crew, tools, material, plans (if posted) and then rather gruffly tells you to step aside in the same tone an overbearing father takes over his son's science project. As you stand back and watch this man take over your project, if you're learned enough in the ways of the world then you're a witness to a young Dwarf getting his "purpose" or "bazngir"(great/important work).

Before you accept this, let me tell you a few truths about these people.

Dwarves like to help:

At first this is going to seem amazing - not only are you getting a free bridge, it will usually be grander than original plans. There will be a toll, and there will be a drawbridge mechanism, allowing you to raise the bridge with pull of a lever. Hell yeah! The roads leading up will be cleared, and overall you will have a bridge that would be the envy of the Capitals. 

However.

If someone from the Capitals were to arrive at your place, take a look at your bridge, he would, to be cruel, snicker at you and congratulate you on your good fortune. If he was to be kind he would pat you on the back gently, like he was offering you sympathy. 

Other Dwarves will arrive. They will take up the support roles, usually in what appears to be an angry confrontation - do you have a place to sleep you idiot - no I'm too busy, but someone should get on that and stop whining about it - well maybe I will, asshole - and suddenly an entire colony of Dwarves will be on your town's outskirts, an entire cottage colony built around the "bridge project". They work all day, they sing songs (mostly about working hard, and how much they hate spiders), they brew and drink ales, and generally keep to themselves. They dig out new mines to provide materials for the bazngir, they cut down forests for the bazngir. Yet - they do not contest leadership of the town over anything except what pertains to the bazngir. You can even tax them - this of course will lead more dwarves to the city to find their own bazngir to provide gold, gems, silver, anything the town wants. The people will grow rich off dwarf labor - far faster than off slave labor. 

Dwarves like to """help""":

Astute men and Vosdht will note that while the bridge is an amazing project, when it's "finished", it's not really finished. Dwarf materials are great, but must be replaced often, and generally like most Dwarf works, must be fussed over constantly. They seem to love this, and the girthegn(work leader, closest thing to a noble they have) will be himself constantly puttering and tinkering and muttering and fidgeting. The work never stops and while the benefits are great - the work never stops. Designed a better bridge? Sod off. We built a better bridge upriver that doesn't need to be worked on forever. Sod. Off. We have advanced technologically to the point that we have flying cars and no need for such things. That's fine - we don't care - we're going to keep working on this bridge, some of the east supports need reinforcement again. At some point the Dwarf bridge just becomes a liability, and the lands they've cleared and settled become enticing...

And what are these things, anyway?

The Dwarf that first got his bazngir from this will still be alive, after many decades, showing no signs of aging. He will, in fact, as long as he has his bazngir, will never die, unless he is slain. If the work was destroyed and couldn't be started up again (buried under a landslide, for example) the Girthegn will start to age normally, and not live more than a decade. After a time, all that will be left will be the great tombs of these people, with usually one Dwarf who found his Bazngir was to protect his people's wealth and remember what was lost. 

But I'm sure you're going to be fine. After all, you're getting a free bridge. So let them help. They like to help. Who do you think built all of our Empire's roads, aqueducts? 

...

Do you think it

was wise to build an Empire on such a foundation?

...

Anyway, I've got a lot of other places to visit, thank you for your business. Good luck with the bridge.

Sketch of Dwarf in traditional armor(chitin)

***Obviously this is just my weird little take on Dwarves, I make no aspersions on your settings or worlds..

Return to Dark Tower RPG: Components/Quality Review + What It's About

I love Return to Dark Tower.   Having played 13 times with a group and 6 solo, I can safely say it was worth the money, especially since people still like it, want to play it, ask about it, etc. It's a dub. I recently bought sleeves, token upgrades, and the Hordes miniatures upgrade because, well, why not? I love this game. 

There's an RPG. I liked the base game, MAZES enough, so I figured, with a bit of extra cash in my pocket, I would pick up this game. I also bought everything for it, because nobody else seems to have, and it needs to be reviewed. 

 tl;dr This game kicks ass. Before I get to the meat of the RPG, I'm going to review the accessories. With photos!

DICE TOWER ACCESSORY / ROLEPLAYING KIT

I am very mixed on this one. It's got what I would call a mixed value. 

The actual tower itself is cardboard, and it's got one of those covers, very nice colors and glossy. Cardboard is hard. It wouldn't hold up your weight, but it's thicker than like, cereal box. Probably just a little thinner than say, the Leviathan box for GW(any of their thick boxes) similar. It's sturdy, has valuable stuff on it. 

 

Behold! The Tower!

This is a tracker for keeping track of a metacurrency the GM gets

This is a list of all of the results of the reinforcement die

And here it is again. Probably could have left this side blank but there it is again.

The top half and the bottom half have magnets on them so the tower stays together and you can rotate it to face you. I actually really liked this.

 

This is the "resolver" that tells you what rolls you need to make to do what actions. More below.

However. The actual tower is not functional enough as a dice tower, as it works about 90% of the time. There's an insert you put in the "top" of the tower, and a tray you put between the top and bottom. Your dice emerge from the tower from a front door, and while it didn't happen a lot, it does happen that the dice, even when dropped to give them more energy to bounce, in my testing, did get stuck a small amount of the time.

 

Tower's center. The dice got stuck here a couple times in testing. Hm.

 I dunno man. You can get dice towers. You don't really need them unless you have asshole players who will literally throw their dice across the room without one. If you know someone with a 3D printer, you can get them for a few bucks and there are free STLs everywhere. Even a 3D printed one from an online seller should be relatively cheap. I dunno. It's not great. The cheat-sheet elements on it are fantastic. The value it adds? I don't know. Because while that's useful, the system is so simple that they put these cheat-sheet elements everywhere. It's not great. 

 Dice! For all your needs.

The dice included are fine. They're colored to match the palette of the original game, but unlike the official MAZES dice you can buy, they are not coming with little symbols on them. The official dice come with crowns and keys, this one should honestly have come with the banners and reinforcement symbols. Disappointingly, it did not. They're fine however, and if you're a Towerhead(I am coining that term) there's a variant, gold colored reinforcement dice. It's the same quality as the RtDT game.

 Basically shorter but longer than an index card and too much info crammed in there.

The sheets included are garbage. They include the tally sheet and the main character sheet, but they're tiny, and the colors, bright and vibrant in the books and basically every other accessory, are washed out here. They're double-sided too, and they're just too goddamn small. Second picture is it on top of a 6x4 inch MDF board I'm using for Hobgoblin move trays. These add zero value to the product. Complete waste of time. They will never be used at my table, holy hell. 

The tokens? They're almost exactly the same as the ones for the board game. I've included one of each of the board game tokens. Slightly smaller, good thick cardboard, they're fine. 

The last thing is the cards. These are awesome. Nice, thick cardboard, glossy, they come with player aids:

- Resolvers for the game (this limits the value of the tower) but also include the "scale"/mass battle resolvers

 - A card for every single pre-built hero in the game, which are all of the heroes in the expansions and base game. Just fantastic, you could hand out blank sheets then just let people choose characters based on their art alone, then fill out.

- A card for every board game Adversary(final boss) and every board game foe(normal enemy)

- Player aid for the darkness metacurrency and explanation on the back what it does. 

- Player aids for every single march action in the game and for bonds.

- Player aids that list all of the named locations, one of each for each kingdom(if you don't have space/interest in the map)

The cards win. They're the best thing here. They do take away from the value of the rest of the package. So if you want to buy this thing, it's 50 USD. The tower works 90% of the time, the character sheets are garbage, the dice are perfectly fine but lack official branding, the tokens are high quality and the cards are probably the best RPG player aids I've ever seen. Value is up to you. It will look cool on the table.

Adversary Screen

The Screen is a typical GM screen. Same thick but not heavy cardboard, glossy, some art. The front has the tower on it, which is a good choice and a couple monsters. It's up there. I like the thing. 

Otherwise there's not a ton to say. It's cheaper, but you know. I don't use GM screens, really. 

 

Okay, now to the meat of the matter...

 

Before we can talk about this game, we have to talk about MAZES. MAZES is an RPG system that borrows a lot of "story game" elements and is full of references to other works.

It uses the Polymorph system. The system gives each player a sigle die - d4 - d6 - d8 - d10, and that's basically your character. There's four types of checks, Books for brain stuff, Boots for agility things, Blades for murder, and Bones for any sort of physical save or strength check etc. The numbers as you likely have seen with the resolver are static. There's Edges to give you more variety in your build, and when you roll the "1" you succeed if the check has something to do with your die type. The highest number on your die is an auto-succeed - but as the GM accumulated metacurrency, namely Darkness - it goes from autosuccess to negotiated success, to never working and becoming an autofail. It's a fun little system, not really built for leveling up but good for telling stories in shorter campaigns. There's spellcasting which uses the dice but there's a lot of abstraction here and it's more about the fiction than the dice. So if you're a fighter(d8) you're going to roll the 4/5/6/7 to hit people a fair bit, and during the start of the adventure you're going to autosucceed a lot. You can fluff this as a battlemage throwing fire bolts or a guy stabbing people. "Blade" is not literal, it's combat. Not a bad idea. There's a health system, you don't get a lot of health but enemies don't do a ton of damage, and the game is sort of designed around you spiraling a bit the longer the adventure goes. You wouldn't go into Kharmlund here but you might want to check out Gahamenzant, my Lankhmar-esque cit1y setting. Never Conquered! So what's different about that compared to here? This is a good system for first time roleplayers, kids, people who just want a small amount of mechanics. It's horrible for people who want any sort of granularity. Like, treasure/inventory is a metacurrency you spend if you have it, you don't mark down 100 gp, you mark down 1-3 treasure points or whatever, and that's a communal resource.

Compatibility

This is so compatible, mostly because the system itself is so simple/good. The book provides specific page numbers and gives clear instructions on using everything from MAZES here and vice versa. Honestly? The word I would use is "fuckin' stellar". I am aware that's two words. 

Map

 

There's a map. I don't like it, it's just a paper map, and if you're buying this, you have Dark Tower. So use that, or the tally sheet which has the regions listed.

Lore

They added lore. Or this is the lore and I didn't see it in the manual. There's not a lot here, basically Nagash's backstory - evil wizard made a big evil tower, got betrayed, died, and now the Tower is just a big pile of "fuck you all" in the center of the continent ruining everything for everyone. I like it enough, the framework lets you add lore in and out as you please. They did explain what all of the monsters were now, which is nice because people going "what is a mormo" got really annoying!

 

Mechanics

 

So, it's MAZES. The game works the same with some added fun stuff. For one, the "key" is now a "banner" action. It's the same. The crown is now a "reinforce action", and it's the same, but if your "forces"(basically a personal army that follows you around, more below) would help you succeed at it, you get it. It requires negotiation at higher darkness levels like in MAZES and it fails at the highest levels of darkness. So its not bad.

 

The Darkness mechanic is a metacurrency. You spend it to do GM fiats or to make the permanent Darkness level go up. You get Darkness by getting it through end of session tally ups. You also get it by having players get dropped. In MAZES there's "conditions" but its a bit different in Dark Tower. You can also negotiate Darkness, like if the players (who are supposed to always be good guys) do something evil, fail a mission, etc. I'm still relatively new to metacurrencies but I don't really see any mechanical weaknesses here, yet. Rising Darkness is a permanent spend. It's the stuff that makes life harder for you. 

 

Mass Battles

There is an interesting mass battle system. I don't necessarily agree its the best way to resolve these, you should just be rolling down the neoprene mats, pulling out your armies of miniatures and having an epic fucking final battle. Alas, this is also fine. The mechanics basically just get another set of names: banner is the same, books becomes tactics, boots becomes march, blades becomes battle, bones becomes defend, and reinforce is the same. Still, it's a nice attempt at doing a mass battle, similar to other OSR games that just sort of say "do a normal fight but say it's a battle".

There are new metacurrencies that mostly function the same as the old ones. There's Spirit, and it does the role of Stars in MAZES. Spirit is casting "big" spells that wouldn't be cantrips, pulling off heroic actions, succeeding when you should have failed, overriding GM fiat. The d4(paragon) character gets four of these. The d10(sentinel) gets one. Treasure is the same as MAZES no changes. That's fine but it's a bit disappointing there aren't like...coin tokens or something. Then there's danger, which replaces the "hearts" from MAZES. Hearts functioned as HP and you spent them to both attack and absorb damage. Now, you take "danger". When you take a "danger" you roll. If you roll above, you're fine. For now. If you match, you're removing all danger, and getting an additional action. If you roll lower, you remove all danger, and take a "consequence". This means you immediately drop, are removed from the scene, take a corruption and finally the Adversary/GM gets a Darkness. Finally Danger is rolled at the end of the session, you basically roll a die for each danger you still have on a table using your class die and the results can either be nothing, the Adversary gets more darkness and such. In MAZES you take conditions and get back up when HP is depleted, worse off than before but not the worst, eventually you will be rolling to not die. I like this system a lot, it's waaay better than the one MAZES uses and it works well since it's a great way to tie in the board game mechanics. 

I'm not going to go into corruptions super heavy, they're basically conditions but there's more than the four standard ones, they're all from the board game and MAZES. You remove them by resting at the end of your session and there's also mini-quests you can do to cleanse them. If you get 3 corruptions, like the board game, it's game ove-I'm kidding of course. The GM gets a fiat, which does various things, but usually they just get carte blanche to be bad to you.

There is a system called Bonds, which are roleplaying prompts that let your characters get better friends with each other. Basically, little miniquests to keep people tied to one another. 

 

Henchmen

 

There is, surprisingly, a henchmen system. You can have a secondary character called a Companion who can go off and do other things for you. They use the same class die as you but you can pick different edges. It's not the old DnD torchboy thing, but I do like it.You can even just have your companion be your guy for the session, and spend that time mustering an army, which is really neat. So, armies:

Forces

There's a really good idea here: You have another "resource" called forces. In this game, you're an accomplished hero gathering forces and solving quests to build up your forces. The player gets to say what their army is, what they do, whatever. It's fun, fluffy stuff. You get a starting forces count thats the max number of your dice. You get 36 tokens in the accessories box, so you have 27 tokens used up and nine more as a float. You get as many spirit tokens which is sort of pointless but what-ever, it works. Also, they can act in your stead with the reinforcements roll as mentioned before. It's a good idea for an army/domain system. Each "forces" in the final battle is an entire army you can use. They still basically function like hit points in a battle, but yeah. Neato stuff.

One downside is for the character creation, which is generally good, each kingdom has a "homeland" generator that requires a d20. Why would you do this? There's no d20 in this game. 

All of the characters from the game are pre-generated here if you don't want to make one, but you can obviously make one easily.

Magic is more developed from MAZES. You have a list of cantrips to give more explanations as to what kinds of things should be free magic spells, you have a list of incantations which are what your spirit spends should be, and you have rituals that basically are your downtime action.

 

Questing

 

Finally, we reach the final bit: so basically, you're a group of powerful warlords and your job is to stop whoever is in the Dark Tower. There's a QUEST phase. You go on quests, these are standard adventure game adventures, however this is set in a region. Failing the quest means the adversary gets the region instead of you (it is possible to reverse this) and thats generally bad for the players. Once you finish the quest phase, you move to the TALLY phase. You resolve something called "claim". If you succeeded through normal adventure game stuff, you win the region, stop the adversary, etc. It seems to be the case that the territory you hail from is "yours" and you attempt to gather more, at least stop the bad guy from getting them. A realm can only be "LOST, FALLEN OR WON". Winning a quest usually means you get treasure, you all roll your dice to get more forces, and then you get the map. Then, the Adversary does the previously mentioned danger rolls, getting Darkness on a 2-3, and a fiat on a 1. 4+ means nothing. You roll for each one seperately so it reinforces well: taking dangers is not so bad when you're a d10 but you're weak magically. A mage can do lots of fun and cool things but you have a 75% chance of making the game harder. Then Adversary can then spend darkness to either add to the Rising Darkness, or spend a darkness to start to unlock the SEALS. These are basically "the tower made everything worse everywhere". Very few mechanics are there for SEALS, it's usually fluff stuff like "there are now packs of ghouls running around eating people" and you're expected as the GM to make the game harder and tie it in. 

There's also fiats, and the examples given are things like "lose a region you won" and "advance the main time limit" and "make an enemy tougher". Basically, all of the stuff from the game, but,  you know. Here. 

Then there's the MARCH phase. Finally, you put spirit back to starting value, reset dangers to zero, and then the adversary ticks down the countdown clock. This can be advanced by fiats but it always does after any mission. There are 12 of these "ticks" and you can probably do two quests a session, depending on length. So, I believe them when they say it could take 3-5 sessions on average to do the campaign. It could, depending on how slow your players are, take 12. This is why I recommend you take darkness whenever the players are being slow/wasting time.  The players also get a downtime action for the next tally phase: diplomacy - to win a region over. travel - you spend this time going somewhere else. Gather information - you get info from the DM/Adversary, recruit, roll your die to get more stuff, rest, which heals a corruption, and bond, which lets you and another PC bond together. I assume one person has to take a quest for questing to happen or you would just skip to the tally phase. But...you might be in a situation where nobody quests because corruptions, but that still wastes time. So they managed to keep the time stuff in.

Blood and Treasure

Finally, there's the final battle. How does it work? If you manage to get a good enough force and learn the Adversary's secret weakness, and you feel confident, you can start the battle at any time. If you run out of time, the Adversary can start a final battle. If the Darkness reaches 7+, the Adversary leaves the tower and becomes one of the things you fight in your quest to win. You can't kill him, just temporarily make him or her go away. So don't fuck around. You will find out.

This means that for every FOE still alive and causing trouble on the board and will give them an ARMY. There's not a ton of explanation how this works or if it's possible to completely delete a foe from the game, but they're basically the monsters and you choose four like the board game. The adversary gets an army (think like a hit point) for each region they conquered, each foe, plus one if they have the huge edge and if their FOE is huge is counts as two armies. Heroes get 1 army for each FORCES they have and for each region they WON. So the heroes start with 31 armies by default and the Adversary starts with....four? And there's undefined mentions that this number can be permanently reduced. Obviously there's still treasure you spend to get advantage (like 5e) on a roll, and you roll off doing battles like a normal battle, but big scale. The book sort of implies you just are supposed to kind of let the players win, but I think you should try to make them lose. 

Overall, that's basically everything how it works. The mass battles are a bit undefined. I really just need to know if you can destroy a FOE from the Adversary's thing forever or what. Otherwise this is a really interesting system. It's a neat way to do a certain type of epic fantastical adventure. It feels like the board game, but offers roleplaying opportunities. I like it. 

- Klang out

...I played Mike Hutchinson's Hobgoblin!

Disclaimer: The Following review is from the perspective of a hobby newcomer(ish...2021), so my interests in this specific type of game might not be aligned with yours...

Hobgoblin is not, despite some efforts made in the lore and such, a good replacement for Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Mike's game is something new and interesting, and it's built around creating certain experiences. If you don't mind four-hourhammer then this game's dedication to fast playing might miss you. If you're really into frontage maximization and not being allowed to make attacks unless your man is touching another model's base then this game's appeal might go over your head. Those aren't bad things, however, and I like those games for what they do.

Thankfully, Hobgoblin isn't that. It feels like it's that at times, what with the "large blocks of troops" focus, rolling a double handful of d6s at minimum and of course having phased combat, but- well let me get my preamble out of the way first.

Hobgoblin is a mass-battle rank and flank wargame developed by the creator of Gaslands, a car combat skirmish game. It's great. Not what we're on about today, however. As I said in the intro, this game, while having the trappings of various other Rank and Flank minis-agnostic games has managed to carve itself out a new niche, and it's a great niche. It's not all perfect, but it does a lot of stuff well. 

Force Creation

In Hobgoblin!, players build forces by choosing a handful of generic options like light/heavy infantry/cavalry, monster, war wagon, chariot, etc and then assign special skills to them to bling them out and make them stronger. All of them have a special to-hit chart that works well and is easy to read. Instead of a more traditional "if they have x (stat), then they hit on y (dice result)" table, it's a "unit type hits unit type on dice result)" which is a bit easier to read. The special skills increase cost, and you can mitigate the costs back down by taking on a maximum of two negative skills, things that make you take damage if you aren't fighting, for example, or things that make you take damage when you roll ones. You can use this to make armies that are similar to the ones you use in games, as is Mike's goal, but I think it'll be more for fluffy, narrative games. Obviously this is similar to other RnF games, because you can put a really powerful super-monster in to the game, but if the FlyingWizardGodzilla that also manages to charge like a truck dies on round 2, then now that's 1/5 of your forces, and the person who built sensible normal army comps is laughing.

Units of troops are basically a base, like a piece of foamcore or lasercut MDF.  There's three kinds of bases - wide, which can be anywhere between eight inches wide and six deep to as small as 4 inches wide by 1.5 inches deep and anything in between - narrow, which is as large as four inches wide and six inches deep to as small as 40mm square(!!!) and Horde - which is 8 inches square or goes as small as 6 inches wide and 4 inches deep. This means you can cut from foamcore or mdf/3dprint some trays that are 6x4 and be completely well served by this, since the advantage is always, always smaller units, being easier to maneuver and having harder to flank. Some games come with pre-made stands, like Runewars and Conquest - these are basically a straight port into hobgoblin.

Battles

You cast your spells, they cast their spells. You move your men, they move their men, you roll for attacks, they roll for attacks. It's a good compromise between alternating activations and you go, I go gameplay. There are no saves. There is no rolling to see if you spellcasting actually works, and spells are chosen from a small list of 9 different lores, most of which have 3. (There is, sadly, no counter-spelling) These spells typically work in buffing your units or debuffing the enemies you're fighting. Naturally there's a healing focused one as well and an undead-summoning one. Buffing is about slapping on traits(the positive skills mentioned above). So in a Warhammer game, you might go "ah yes, you gain the ability to auto-damage on nat sixes until the end of your next turn" in this game you'll typically gain a trait, usually a +1 to courage(health) or strikes(attacks) and things like that or they'll be temporarily larger and such. On top of this, spells have no limit except how many mana/mercury tokens you have. It feels very much like a Magic the Gathering system but once they're spent, they're gone. You get more based on every 1000 points you still have in your army, and one for each wizard in your army, and then you get two(or a fortune card) when a unit of yours dies(in most cases). Save up your tokens for the big spells(6 mana) or use the perfectly fine buffs for quick and easy victories. I will say that losing men granting you mana doesn't actually do a great job as a catchup mechanic, but it's thematic and flavorful and it feels good - but if you're losing by a lot, like losing 3 units in a turn, the six mana isn't going to make a huge difference.

Moving your ranked up guys is pretty easy. Wheeling an inch per move, blowing half your move to pivot on the spot in any direction, shuffling side to side or backwards, paying the enormous cost of a movement point per half inch.

So that's ranking, but what do we do about the flanking? Well, for one, if your frontage (or even just a gingerly little corner) is touching another enemy's base, you are engaged with them. Being engaged to multiple foes causes a splitting of your assignable dice - without decent buffs, every baseline unit in the game rolls 10d6 to attack, and if you're engaged by three guys, you have to split your attacks between three guys - who all each, if unengaged, get to pour all of their attacks into you. On top of this, it's 5 dice maximum of enemies on the side, and three to the rear for the defender, meaning if the enemy flies a powerful dragon behind them and hits your unit, you do get to fight back, correct, but you will have a much smaller chance of making that dragon pay. So there's a large advantage to moving correctly, and you are rewarded very well for it.

Finally, there's shooting before we get to combat resolution, and shooting is perhaps a bit weaker than in other games? You can assign a maximum of five doom(wounds) to a unit that's been shot, cannot shoot through your own men, or while engaged. It's definitely more of a "soften them up" role and if you're thinking of rows and rows of massed bowmen a la elves, you're going to find that you really probably only want two or three.

Combat resolution is done by "everyone gets to attack" so there's no initiative to keep track of when fighting. You attack, count hits, place doom, play fortune cards, and then the process is repeated for the other side, so in a lot of ways, it's like Battletech - initiative matters more for movement than anything else. 

Finally, the doom phase. So "doom" is just "wounds and panic" here, and it's represented as a die or tokens. Most units have 10 "courage" which is effectively your health, so it's still themed around making your enemy rout by panicking them, not killing them. The Horde unit, by the way, has 20, so those 8x8 blocks are basically there to sit on an objective and be annoying for a couple rounds. Double if you're healing them. Units with the same or more doom than courage are removed, friendlies near them get a doom, and you collect your mana or fortune cards, then you do it again.

I guess I should explain the fortune cards. They're basically a small pool with many copies of useful effects like stealing initiative, not getting broken(dying) for a turn regardless of how much doom you have. You get one a turn, and can trade them(and mana, for that manner) for a re-roll of a single die, but they're just so useful, but again, no so useful that you can completely reverse the turn of the battle.

And I think, that's where Hobgoblin! shines. It's got lots of mechanics to keep getting absolutely fuckin' tabled interesting. It also is decidedly **not** like Warhammer Fantasy Battles and isn't really trying to be, despite the various nods in the lore. This is not One Page Rules, you should not come here to play "Not-Warhammer" because you don't like GW, which I think is a strength it has over OPR, since that game is way too much like Warhammer to truly ever become great, or really, ever it's own thing, and Hobgoblin! is mostly it's own thing, both mechanically and flavorfully. This is game where you can expect most of your army to get destroyed and still win, which has led to people wondering if it's even possible to do campaign play in this system, since it's so deadly, and you're not able to mitigate attacks being thrown your way like you can in WHFB with initiative and things like that. 

 

There are some downsides, and this is mostly in the setting he has come up with. There's a bit too much leaning on the "anything can happen here" which means there's not..really any lore at all, since the lore is basically about there being 13 magical artifacts that are cursed, but you can use them to basically wish entire armies, species etc into existence, which is great, but it would be nice if there was some more flavor here. Keeping it vague prevents you from writing yourself in a corner but come on my man!! There's also a weird thing he does when he does add lore - he'll call things names like "Ice Elves" or "Copper Dwarves" and these are not a good way to spark the imagination - for example, if you're doing Warhammer and the game mentions Kislev, they say Kislev. They don't say "And up to the north Fantasy Russia fights an eternal war against The Eye Of Terror, but Cold." They say that Kislev is constantly defending itself against the seemingly infinite warband incursions of the Chaos Wastes. Mike...needs to explore the setting more. What does the ability to wish up legions of soldiers mean, man? I digress. It should be a testament to what an excellent game Hobgoblin! is that my biggest issues are the flavor, and Mike's unwillingness to actually develop an IP here, but he should, because he's got the chance to have straight up gold. 

 The biggest indicator of why I thought this game was awesome was because when I got destroyed, I didn't have to think about things I liked to make up for the pain of losing like I did for GW's offerings, I just hopped into their app and changed things. "That didn't work, let's try this. This worked, let's buff that. That wasn't super effective, so it can go." At the end of the day, I really just want to play Hobgoblin! again, and I can't really think of a single better endorsement for the title. 

Kharmlund #10 and #11 and 12: Hyper-minimalist session recaps for lazy DMs!

Hello Kharmlundians! I'm still here and just being lazy when it comes to updates. These take awhile to write, so the format will probably be changing just to keep them to a few paragraphs. The important stuff, you know. These players...they do a lot.

LVND STATUS: Perigree, Half-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. 

In a quick summary for chapter 10 of this story:

Ildaberd took over the cult and downgraded Vincent, the leader of said cult, to sub-pope or whatever. The cult was also re-jiggered to be less obvious in its dress and speech. 

Then, the crew went-a-delving. They struck north and began to explore, wanting to find and deal with Kurgan. Another henchman died today, with a trapped door that sort of just "enveloped" him. I don't remember writing this trap, I just wrote "envelope door" which I guess could have just been an envelope door, like a slot to put envelopes through? Oh well, nameless cultist, your corpse has been reclaimed by...KHARMLUND!!

They checked out a few rooms. There was a room full of chests, and each of them had a goblin hiding in them, except for one. After the first two, the party just started getting into position. Again, I was likely high as a kite when I wrote this stupid one. 

They ran into a room where a very trustworthy man in a mirror asked them to bring him scalps - any scalp will do that they literally refused the mirror-man's reasonable request. So rude!

Finally they met Kurgan - an Orc type. No - not an Arin-Vosdht, no this orc had taken the "return to monke" vibe quite seriously, and spent a lot of time blathering about "alpha males' and so on. They brought him some headdresses from Vulfskin, the same ones worn by Arin-Vosdht scouts and he took them with a smile, but they also brought him something impressive - a golem control rod from Yoki - the leader of Newforge. Finally, they convinced him to let them in level 2.

Level 2 is brightly lit by hundreds of blue led-like lights. Kurgan summoned a golem (by making noise) and they demonstrated how the control rod works. Kurgan was impressed and took it, falling for an obvious trap as they handed him the circlet they got a few sessions ago from the bandits who were occupying RiverFort. With Kurgan under their control(they basically put him in "heroin mode") they called down his guards, who joined him. The golem was used to mash face and the treasure horde of Kurgan was now under the party's control, including several very evil looking swords. Kurgan was handed over to Newforge as a prisoner. 

A lot - a lot of gold was acquired on this day. 

Session 11: 

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

Aurelius, Half-Orc Fighter, played by anon.

"Carver" played by anon.

Fosuth WarmedCloak - Dwarf(BASED BASED BASED BASED) - Played by anon.

Rasputina, Human Necromancer - Played by Anon

LUND: PERIGREE, HALF QUARTER

Summaries for sessions 11 and 12.

These were pretty simple sessions without a ton to report. The party was basically "rushing" the character levels for Fosuth and Rasputina. It was nice to have a wizard, since they can choose spells from a tower. Beeeeesides that, it was exploring the Ratmen areas since they were untouched, there was a lot of combat to be had, Fosuth had a sword called "cleaver" which did the "cleave" from other systems (if you kill, attack again until you miss or fail to kill) and Ratmen ain't shit. 

Not much Ratmen were in the first delve, but they did find another Gemlatinous Cube, and this time, they stole it's heart back to the tower. Another fun project for Nibbles to work on. It's the first "heart" the party has acquired.

Second one went better. They killed quite a few ratmen, found a cleric who joined them since his party was butchered and found the first ratman "female" or "breeder" - a sticky black pool of bubbling tar guarded by a rat-frankenstein monster. He mushed the cleric but otherwise was easily defeated. Testing the "female" by throwing random junk into it didn't do much, so Rasputina threw a zombie into there to see. Then the party encountered a larger group of Ratmen, who were being escorted by a ram-horned wizard there, who promised them good times with breeders. The party and them engaged. Ildaberd used the horrible wand of skin-removal to nearly kill him, and he fought a mental mage battle with Ildaberd (mechanics need to be improved) which Ildaberd was winning, but then someone just killed the rat mage and that was that. With that out of the way, the other ratmen ran screaming into the din. They did a bit more exploration, Rasputina found some viable bones for her...necromancy things. They also captured a Ratman who was painting miniatures and stole his entire stash and his money he was saving up to buy his next army with, the monsters. They also found some diseased rats tending an egg garden, stole one, and then burned all of the other ones, simply because they cut an egg open and it nearly killed Aurelius. 

 With bags loaded with gold the party then left, taking their gold and captives. I would have done more details but I was taking too long with these. They should be going back to more normal type updates next. 

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!