BSSS - Session 7

The Bull of Heaven

Summary 

The PC's travel to a new town to investigate rumors of a bronze colossus, but things don't quite go as planned, mostly due to me reading the dungeon wrong.

Characters

• Athra - Fighter
• Gal-Naha the Giant Gecko
• Esho - Sorcerer
• Shimsusa the Archer - level 1 Fighter
• Maru the Witch - Sorcerer
• Rajini - Sorceress

Session Recap

After an entire session of essentially Downtime, the players were ready to head out, and their plan was to take a boat down along the Serpent of Smoke to another town and explore some adventure tips they got during previous sessions.

After a short and uneventful boat ride the group arrived in the late afternoon outside the titanic walls of Bastion of the Raging Bull, a heavily fortified and militaristic fortress-city, firmly dominated by the old imperial cult of the Bull of Heaven. They met with Captain Temen of the Bull Guards, who gave them the law of the land (visitors need a clay seal to be allowed into the city. Outsiders are allowed only within the Public Sector. Barbarians and sorcerers tainted by too much magic must reside in the Restricted Sector. No casting of spells within the city walls by outsiders.) and also confirmed the rumors of a massive bronze colossus somewhere in the jungles to the north of town. With introductions out of the way the party settled in for the evening, also finding a guide to help lead them through the jungle.

On the next morning they decided it was prudent to visit the temple of the Bull located in the outsider zone and make an offering, as well as talk to the priest there. The Bull Priest explained that the town tries to maintain the old traditions of the bygone Empire, and as such views people who practice sorcery outside of the directions of Imperial cults rather suspect. They also dislike people who dabble in summoning inhuman and otherworldly beings or deal with necromancy (two of the three sorcerers in the party start to sweat profusely and try very hard not to let out an awkward laugh). One of the players that is playing a sorcerer was disappointed that joining the cult of the Bull of Heaven would involve several years of training and practice before he is even taught any of their magic, so the party bid the priest farewell and left for the jungle.

While travelling through it, they did have two encounters - one with a group of river pirates, which their guide successfully managed to help them avoid, and one with four feathered monstrosities closer to the location of the colossus. The fight with the mutated beasts did result in one of the longer-serving mercenaries to die, but otherwise it was quite successful for the players. They set up camp and in the next morning explored the Colossus.

The colossus in question is a small-ish dungeon I got from Gus L’s blog, which I thought would fit quite well in my own campaign as the broken and magically contaminated old remnant of an Law-aligned army’s war machine. It took some futzing about with ladders, tying ropes and climbing up and down the thing’s legs for the party to safely disable the trapped entry hatch and then go inside, only to be met with another trapped hatch, this one also magically locked from the other side (more on that in the observations below). Stumped by this barrier to their progress, the group sent out their giant gecko companion(Gal-Naha) to explore some of the other possible entrances, but in both cases it returned simply repeating in the simplistic language of beasts “bad, bad, bad, scary, very scary, very scary!” and refused to elaborate.

Because of that, one of the sorcerers climbed up to check out the front of the colossus where they saw some windows. Through them he found a larger room, filled with rubble and destroyed machinery, and in the middle of it - a giant pile of tree trunks, bones, vines, feathers, other unmentionable things all centred on a giant stone altar covered in foul-smelling candles. The altar came alive, clearly some kind of magical construct which meant that this pathway to the insides of the war machine was also blocked off. The party’s necromancer did get a bit more information out of it, figuring out that this was some incredibly powerful necromantic construct, powered seemingly by hate, pain and the desire to kill and destroy.

With little in the way of progress the party decided to head back into town, with plans to figure out a way to get access to a spell that can open magically sealed locks.

Observations - What happens when you don't read the dungeon correctly?

So, two things I want to talk about regarding this session.

First off, worldbuilding - I came up with the details regarding this new town the day before the game itself, and as such did not even have a name for the town when the players visited it, only coming up with it yesterday (hence the post here). This was honestly fine. You really do not need to have everything figured out and planned out, you only need enough so that the players have a sense of the place and how to act within it. There are plenty of such places on the map of the Fertile Lands and I only have a vague idea for about a handful of those, and that is absolutely okay.

Secondly, dungeons. So…I realised, post-factum, that I had completely bungled up the layout of the dungeon. Part of it is due to the layout and write up of the dungeon itself, part of it is simply me not having had the chance to properly read through it several times and catch this weirdness before I started running it. After reading through it a few times I realised that the magically locked hatch is probably in a different level of the machine than where I thought, meaning the party probably had a way to go deeper if they desired. Oh well. I apologised to the players when I found this out, and we decided that in a future session they’ll be returning anyway, and we can just say the machine magically rearranged itself, or maybe they just now noticed an entrance they had missed.

Still, it is a very awkward feeling, like a pit in my stomach, when I realized that the session had ended as abruptly as it did due to me bungling the map, rather than it simply being a hard dungeon to navigate (though, to be fair, it is a rather deadly environment in its own right).

Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel - Bastion of the Roaring Bull

 My party has recently travelled down the Serpent of Smoke in search for some more adventure locations, and have set up shop in a city near the edge of the jungle - the Bastion of the Roaring Bull, or simply The Bastion for short.

Background

The Bastion was once simply the fortified core palace of a much larger city, but as the Empire broke apart and shattered, it ended up eventually becoming a small and very heavily fortified city. The city was used as a safe haven against the raging war with the various invaders, as well as the fights between the forces of Law and Chaos, with people being guided there by the priesthood of the Bull of Heaven, one of the old gods of the Empire. 

Now, a century later, the Bull Priests are firmly in control of the city, along with their devoted guards, and the divine protection of the Bull of Heaven. 

General Description

The Bastion of the Roaring Bull has architecture similar to most of the old Imperial cities, although a lot of the style seems almost archaic, with traditionalism and attempting to maintain the Old Ways of life in the empire are prized within the city walls.

Speaking of city walls, the outer walls of the Bastion are perhaps its most striking feature, being almost absurdly and unnecessarily tall slabs of stone and brick, built up over the preceding century as a reaction to the various armies of Order and Chaos that fought in its vicinity.

The great walls of the Bastion.

The city is composed of a series of walled segments - the largest one is the actual city itself, where only citizens are allowed to enter, or those outsiders given a special permit by the Bull Guards. Next to the city's ports is a single and very heavily fortified gate which leads into the Public Sector, the main place where outsiders, traders and visitors are allowed to stay. The Public Sector does maintain several temples (the largest being, of course, that of the Bull of Heaven), markets and loads of places to sleep, eat or drink. There are even some out of town merchants, mostly members of the Golden Fraternity, who own homes in there. 

To the side of the Public Sector is the Restricted Sector - the place where people who are obviously tainted by sorcery, barbarians and others are permitted to stay. The people of the Bastion dislike magic for its unpredictable and often corrupting way, and while they are okay allowing its practitioners within the city walls, they prefer to keep the more corrupted and mutated ones in a separate location, where they can be kept under watch in case they try to pull something. 

Quirks and Features

Dislike of Sorcery 

As stated above, the people of the Bastion tend to mistrust any magic that does not come from the Bull of Heaven and its sorcerer-priests, or has clear corrupting powers like demonology, necromancy or anything to deal with otherworldly and inhuman forces. Outsiders that perform magic within the boundaries of the city are escorted to the Restricted Sector and allowed to only reside there, or leave. After a second infraction, they are executed without any trial or chance of mercy. 

Most people from the city also tend to greet themselves by throwing up the bull horns with their hand, as a sign of protection against evil magic, and bull testicles are often hung above door frames as a protective charm.

The Sons of the Bull Warrior Society

A Bull Guard standing atop the city walls.

The old Empire had a long tradition of Warrior Societies - organizations somewhere between a social club and mercenary companies, composed of nobles, professional soldiers and others who all shared traditions, military practices or worshiped a specific imperial deity. 

The Sons of the Bull (most commonly referred to as Bull Guards)  are one of the few remaining warrior societies, and Bastion is their city. They are each personally devoted to the Bull of Heaven, and have undertaken the rituals and initiation rites of the society, granting them various powers and martial techniques kept secret from outsiders, as well as the right to wear a horned helmet as a symbol of their status. 

The Bull Guards are in charge of most things in Bastion, being its defenders, police force and guardians. Their leader is Commander Utu, an actual divine offspring of the Bull of Heaven himself - a towering mountain of a man with a bull's head. They are devoted to the Bull Priests and it is incredibly rare for a Bull Guard to disagree with the orders and judgement of one of the priests. 

Alignment

The city is staunchly against both the Lords of Order and Lords of Chaos. The Bull of Heaven is one of the few remaining City Gods and gods of the old empire that still answers the prayers of its worshipers, and as such the population (mostly, again, based on the guidance of the Bull Priests) looks upon both Law and Chaos with distrust - recognizing them as both ultimately inhuman and anti-human forces. 

Anyone associated with either Law or Chaos is generally only allowed within the Restricted Zone, if let into the city at all. The city is thus a strange contradiction - a traditionalist, very conservative and militaristic society, which none the less still ultimately cares about humanity over other concerns. 

Many thanks to Eldritch Fields for helping me come up with the name for this place, as well as some of the cultural quirks of its people.

BSSS - Session 6

Summary

A session of downtime activities including, but not limited to - summoning demons, negotiating with barbarians, gathering a huge posse and having a big ol' fight with a bunch of berserkers.

Characters

• Athra - Fighter
• Gal-Naha the Giant Gecko
• Esho - Sorcerer
• Shimsusa the Archer - level 1 Fighter
• Maru the Witch - Sorcerer
• Syphon Gandu - Sorcerer
• Rajini - Sorceress

Session Recap

This week’s session of Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel consisted mostly of an extended downtime around the Undying City as the players had a lot they wanted to do. I won’t list out every single thing, but the primary activities they got to were.

They visited the manor gifted to them by Bel of the Lotus, the vampire they freed last session. The manor is in the nicer part of the Merchants’ Quarter and can either house one person as Luxury accommodations or 4 in Standard (which is what the group decided to use it for), also being safe due to having high walls and its own guards. So the party now has a proper base, and due to Bel being of non-insignificant means, the house doesn’t really have much in the way of expenses for the next 3 years.

Another thing they wanted to do was identify the three magical swords they retrieved (one of which was stuck through the heart of said vampire) from Gladio’s temple. They decided to simply ask the barbarian who originally gave them the tip for the dungeon (now dubbed Conan, because why the fuck not). He told them that he thinks those are three of the nine pieces of the Ninefold Sword, a holy relic of Gladio the Sword God. Conan offered to buy them off the party, but instead they decided to work out a deal where they’ll give them to him once he finds the other 6. He rounded up a bunch of other adventuring types and set off to the temple!

Meanwhile one of the other PCs, Syphon Gandu, who had been in town during all of this adventuring, had decided to try and find someone who can teach him some more Diabolism spells. Him and the other Diabolist in the party had had little luck finding any tutors in town, and generally have been met with disapproval and distrust from the town’s magic community. So as a last ditch effort he called on a demon, which identified itself as the Empty Thought. It agreed to lead him to a tutor, but in return demanded to command his body for a month. After some negotiations he agreed, managing to keep his own consciousness for about a week before blacking out after just an absolute shitton of drugs the demon took in one of the premiere brothels in town.

At the end of the month, Syphon awakened back in control of his own body, his spine now elongated, twisted and bent into an arch due to magical corruption from the demon casting way too many spells while in control. He also found himself in the hut of a person calling themselves Malah, who said they owed debt to the Empty Thought, and was going to teach Syphon magic as a way to pay off said debt. The demon had indeed kept his end of the bargain (mostly).

The party also heard various rumours and news, mostly relating to things they had encountered in previous sessions. The Temple of Ishtar which had become infested with slimes and Slime Priests had apparently gotten worse, now very much a Chaos-aligned stronghold on literally the opposite side of the rover from the city itself! The city had sent out a force to try and clear it out, but had been ambushed by Northern Barbarian berserkers and some horrible beast, and very few had ultimately managed to get back even with their lives, let alone achieving any success. To make things worse, some 50 odd people from the refugees they encountered two sessions ago, now living in the slums outside the city gates, had been seen going into the Temple District and so far have not emerged back. Rumours are starting to spread about what is going on in there.

With all of this and other minor tasks out of the way, the party decided to round up a bunch of mercenaries and left for the ruins, looking for trouble. Trouble did indeed find them, in the form of 55 Chaos berserkers, their leader and a chaos beast that looked somewhere between a bear, a porcupine and a giant maw on legs.

A big fight ensued, mostly as a way to test out a system of using warbands (taken from Errant) as a way of streamlining having to deal with too many mercs during combat. The party won the fight with a rousing success, mostly due to exceptionally good rolling on their part, and returned home.

Observations

Oh boy, this session! With my decision to cap the length of these weekly sessions, mostly for the sake of my own stamina and mind, it has been kind of hard for them to really do as much as before. The plan was to basically play out all the preparations and downtime activities they wanted, so we can skip those next time and simply get to travel and potentially even dungeon crawling! The big fight in the end, as I said ,was me testing out a work in progress hack of taking the system of handling mercenaries as a Warband from Ava Islam’s Errant, but making it work in OD&D.

The main conclusion is…the system still needs work. Porting from Errant to OD&D is a lot trickier than I initially thought, as Errant doesn’t use a To Hit roll, only Damage, unlike OD&D (a potential future blogpost if I ever get around to sorting my thoughts and observations on the relation between Chainmail, OD&D and Into the Odd) and that causes all kinds of weird cases to pop up in practice.

Further more, while the fight between the PCs and the barbarians would have been excruciating to do in my normal system (I do not want to have to roll 50-odd attack rolls per round, fuck that), it was not all THAT more streamlined as I wanted it either. My main reasoning for wanting to use warbands in the first place is to make combat take a fewer rolls and therefore IRL time as I can. I hate long combats (another future blogpost!) and so anything to make them move at a faster pace is a potential plus in my book.

The players did enjoy some aspects of it (the reduced book keeping when it came to hirelings!), but there are still major issues with how this integrates, a lot more than I had before this playtest. In no particular order, questions which I still need to clarify for myself and make a decision on are:


* How does one determine the warband’s HP? In Errant is based on Armor, which is how I ran it on the table, but Armor in Errant is more similar to Hit Points in OD&D than AC, so my initial thought was to use HD. That however means that the equipment of the actual mercenaries is more or less irrelevant, and that makes no sense to me.

* As warbands are simply an extension of the PC that leads them, and add a bonus to attacks, what happens when a Sorcerer has a squad of archers under their control and wants them to fire? The way I handled it, they can still do that, but they have to use the Sorcerer’s To Hit bonus, which is usually negotiable. However, this allows a Sorcerer to basically use bows, when they normally could not.

* Can a Sorcerer cast a spell while their warband is shooting at the enemy? After all the sorcerer themself is not doing anything, yet it feels kind of like cheating the combat phases to be able to both cast and shoot in a round.

* How do some spells that deal damage to everyone in an Area of Effect interact with warbands? A warband has its own abstracted HP total, so there was some questions how effective things were. One spell, Dust of the Sandman (from Wonder and Wickedness which is what I use for magic in my game) was actually more effective than normal, while another - Miasma, felt rather weakened. It’s a rather fuzzy bit of ruling that I do not like, as I want warbands to streamline combat, not create more opportunities for me to have to figure out just how the fuck things are supposed to work.

* How much should merc gear matter into their ability to fight as a warband? I don’t want this to be a mass combat system, this needs to be simply one step above the regular 1 to 1 fights, but as a way to handle slightly larger fights. The way it is right now it can integrate between the two scales, but not entirely to my liking.

So all in all this was actually a very fun and productive session, even if my playtest ended up leaving me with more doubts regarding the usefulness of warbands, rather than making me want to use them in the game.