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.