Review - Muster, A Primer for War

Time for another review! And since I just finished re-reading Muster, let’s talk about it! This is going to be a bit more rambling as a review than the two modules I did, because, well, it’s a different kind of book!

Muster cover art.

Overview

Muster is a rather interesting read, as it is not really an RPG book or a module. Instead it’s a book of theory and advice on how to place D&D in what the author calls “the wargaming way” - a style of play similar to or adjacent to OSR play, though with some interesting peculiarities. This puts it in a similar category to Philotomy’s Musings, or perhaps smaller works like the Old School Primer by Matt Finch and the Principia Apocrypha.

The book was written by Eero Tuovinen and illustrated by Sipi Myllynen. I am not sure who did the layout and editing, but it is published by Arkenstone Publishing so…someone from there, presumably?

What works for me

I like this book a lot. I mean a lot. It’s 250 pages and I’ve read it twice now, which considering the size of my To Read list is probably unwise, yet here we are.

Let’s try and go over some of the things present in the book, because there’s a lot. The book begins by laying out first off what is meant by “wargaming way”. It is a curious term, as it refers to the old Prussian kriegsspiel which are generally seen as the progenitor of civilian hobby wargames that came in the century or two after it.

On one hand, it is rather odd why this term was chosen, as opposed to simply using the much more popular label of OSR. However I think since this method of play was developed within a relatively small group of Finnish gamers (from what I can gather from the text at least), I think it is also okay to give it a distinct name.

Next up the book presents the basic tenets of the Wargaming Way of play, divided into a Basic Outlines portion and an Advanced Matters portion. The Basic Outlines covered are things one can find in the other theory or instructional texts that I linked above - do not fudge dice rolls; always start at 1st level; the importance of the campaign as a coherent world rather than an individual character or party of characters; goal-based XP (usually 1 exp point for 1 gold. We’ll get to this later); player-driven gameplay and general disregard for formal rules texts in any situation where they do not actively contribute to helping run the game.

One thing that is a common feature of OSR pedagogical texts and has become a common mantra, and yet is missing from this text, is the whole “combat is a fail state” declaration. The book does not seem to agree, with that combat is in fact often the entire point of the specific scenario or situation set up by the GM for the players, and figuring out how to tackle it in a way which can lead to victory may be the entire point.

The book also covers stuff like Dungeon Doctrine and how a group can go about developing it - how to open doors, how to explore corridors, how to react to given situations. The kind of play that groups playing in high-lethality dungeon crawling scenarios tend to quickly learn how to do simply so they don’t just get wiped out every 10 steps.

There is also advice for the GM on how to set up this type of game, denoting two forms of campaign - the basic and extended campaign. The basic campaign consists of simply picking a module, running players through it, then picking another one, and then another one and so on. The extend is what is commonly called “sandbox” play where you have a wide open world through which the players are free to explore and direct the game.

I do wish the book actually went into a bit further detail on how to actually do the work of organizing this however. Of course every Referee’s workflow on preparing a campaign is slightly different, but outlining good common practices to keep in mind like how to organize players, how to keep track of time, location and note taking, how to incorporate modules that do not quite fit with your world’s setting into it - those are all good pieces of advice I think would have fit quite well within this book.

Next up a thing that I like is a small chapter titled D&D and Chauvinism which covers D&D’s ties with adventure fiction of the early 20th century and the implication that has for what kind of stories D&D tends to replicate - tales of colonialism, imperialism and so on. If you’ve read anything by Traverse Fantasy or Zedeck Siew you probably already know all this stuff. The book also does come to the same conclusion that I have come to regarding all of this, which is that attempting to seek some kind of political (or god help you, moral) purity through playing elfgames is probably misguided and it’s a lot simpler to just acknowledge that the characters in these games are, well, amoral (if not immoral) assholes.

The inclusion of this chapter is one I feel was a good call. While it is mostly unrelated to the rest of the text and feels a bit shoved and out of place…that’s also kind of the point, I feel. It acts as a good stopping point for the various flavors of self-deluded reactionary elements in the OSR. And anything that reminds those people that they’re fucking idiots is alright by me!

Other things of note - the text comments on experience points and their importance to the wargaming method on numerous occasions. It instructs using exp as more or less a victory points score in an old arcade game. An indicator of how far you’ve gotten and how well you’re doing in the game. The book is very very clear that experience points should be earned through clearly predefined goals, and not as participation awards or awards given for doing any out-of-game activity.

While I do agree with this sentiment to some degree… I also give experience in my current campaign for numerous activities such as carousing, players doing mapping, acting as a quartermaster or as a caller or writing session reports. However my reasoning behind giving experience of those things is that that experience acts, in its own way, as a teaching tool - it rewards what I consider good practices for players in an OSR play style.

An interesting aspect of this approach to XP is that I did not find anywhere in the book a mention of giving experience points based on enemies defeated or killed. The only concrete example is giving exp for treasure retrieved (the typical 1 gp = 1xp practice found in a lot of OSR games). I am not sure if that is a deliberate omission or simply one that was not mentioned but still used. The whole “goal-oriented exp” thing is also something I’ve been thinking about as well in my own campaign. In the session where my players were attempting to break into and disable the garrison of a gatehouse I had decided early on that they were not going to receive experience points for killing the guards or the loot they foud in the gatehouse, as giving experience for that means that the next logical step would be simply murdering people in the streets for exp too. However, as you see in the Observations part of that session recap, I also in the end decided to grant the party exp based on the fact that they had a specific goal for this session and they managed to achieve it.

So I suppose I do see the value in goal-based experience points, however this is another case where I wish the book actually laid out a much more practical example of “This is how this Referee in our game used experience points” and lay out what kind of goals were used in the game as well as what kind of experience points were given. I suspect not a lot of exp though, considering that the book says that getting a character from level 1 to level 2 takes about 10 to 12 sessions of play!

There are a few “war stories” sprinkled throughout the book of various players from that play group discussing situations that occurred in the campaign(s?) they’ve played in over the last few years, and used as illustrative examples of the wargaming way. They’re neat, and also can easily be skipped which I think is probably the best way to handle these types of stories. They did, however, offer some amazing bits of writing like the party in one game deciding they will bring down a group of body-possessing witches by…framing them for witchcraft. Or the curious cultural touchstone of the module B9 Caldwell and Beyond and its place in Finnish D&D culture.

The last thing I’d like to single out to comment on is what the author terms the Nihilistic Void, which is the strange situation that results in this style of gameplay - the fact that the Referee, despite moving the enemy pieces, should ideally not actually play as an enemy of the players. Which then means that the players simply are struggling against the void of failure itself. The book spends a few pages discussing the implications of losing characters and the emotional impact it has, and I’ll admit that this is something that I’ve struggled with on how to handle as a referee myself.

There is a lot of good in this book, and honestly, for me to cover all of it would be to essentially write a very messy synopsis of every chapter, so let’s move on.

What doesn’t work for me

I have only one main criticism of the book, and that’s to do with layout. While the actual text itself is laid out perfectly well and is easy to read, at some point there was an odd decision made to include these pages of schematics which are, at least in theory, supposed to visualize what the text around them is talking about.

This is not really helping.

However the issue with them is twofold. First off they just kind of don’t do a good job at actually explaining the text in a visual way, and I personally found the more confusing than the actual body of the text, not less. Secondly, they are inserted often right in the middle of a chapter, basically splitting the text from one page to another, which is not unreadable ro anything, but definitely a baffling layout decision regardless. For my money, they could have easily been moved around to split the text between chapters or topics…or just outright dropped.

The layout issues continue with the fact that the Table of Contents is not really in the beginning of the book. Instead there is a manifesto of sorts for the wargaming way, and only then do you get to the table of contents. I personally would have switched them around.

Lastly, the artwork in the book. The book actually has a surprisingly high amount of art, and some of it in full color (so are the pages of visual aids too, as you can see above). Meaning no disrespect to the artist who illustrated the book, most of this art could have simply been cut. While the actual style of the illustrations itself is sketchy and generally fine for this sort of book, their implementation within the layout and text is mostly just “waste of space”. There has not been a single page in the book which I felt was improved by the inclusion of art in it and so that made the art feel peripheral and sort of just solved in, rather than an actual contributing element to the overall quality of the book.

Beyond these minor quibbles though there is not much really bad with the book. For me at least these were, at best, minor irritants rather than something that actively made me unable to read the book.

Conclusion

I would say this book does a very successful job at what it attempts to do - act as a primer and instructional text for how to play in the so-called wargaming way. I have found a lot of useful ideas and approaches in the book that I’ve either implemented in my own games or am considering for future ones. There’s also been several things that I don’t really agree with and so would not use. I’ve not really mentioned those here though, because to me this isn’t a problem with the text itself, simply a difference in opinion on playstyle.

My conclusion to this is simple - this is a good text and I think most people who play or run OSR games should read it, if for no other reason than to simply see another similar approach to this style of play.

Where to get it

You can get it for free from DriveThruRPG. Print options are also available. You can also find more from Eero at Arkenstone Publishing.

BSSS - Session 12

 

 Summary

A side-story set a week before the previous session of characters heading out of the Undying City to figure out where the barbarians that keep attacking it are, what their deal is, and, hopefully, bringing back information about it before the big procession at the end of the week. Then a whole lot of murder happens. Characters

• Shimsusa the Archer - 2nd Level Fighter
• Sargira - 1st Level Psychomancer Sorceress
• Hazail - 1st Level Fighter

Session Recap

With the big procession for the beginning of the new year (and, unbeknownst to most people, for the transformation of everyone into the city into the Unliving) the authorities recruit a group of Scavengers, give them some muscle, and tell them to head north and figure out what is the deal with the barbarians that have spent the last month or so showing up outside the gates of the city, murdering everything that is caught outside the gates...then simply leaving. 

While the Undying City is quite used to Northern Barbarians trying to attack the city, especially so after it had aligned itself with a lord of Law, they have always been interested in actually attacking the city. These guys were clearly acting different, showing no desire to actually go inside (and at a horde of several hundred strong it is not beyond the realm possibility they might be able to do it too) or even besiege the city, simply leaving once they have left the fields outside its walls soaked in blood. 

Shimsusa the Archer, former mercenary and now full member of the Hedgehogs of Mercy company goes along with the expedition as both an "expert" and also to keep an eye out for what is actually going on.

The expedition had headed up the river, following the road, being almost certain that these barbarians were followers of the Sword God and so figured the best place to start looking would be his temple. They also suspected (quite rightfully) that they were probably being lead by their old acquaintance Conan. 

The trip following the road north is quiet and uneventful. After all, with these barbarians roaming the plains and seemingly coming out of nowhere, it's not exactly common to see many merchants around (plus the only large city up north was destroyed several months ago by strange heavily armored assailants). 

Eventually the party reached some ruins that the players were familiar with from an earlier expedition and decided to look around the place (having found signs of fires and camps in an earlier ruin along the road) and just settle in for the evening. As they were in the process of searching the ruins, they saw a great dust cloud approaching them and soon were greeted by a host of 45 Chariot Nomads, out looking for barbarians as well. Apparently the barbarians had assaulted one of their camps, inflicting heavy losses, so the Chariot Nomads were out for vengeance. The two groups agreed to cooperate, having a shared goal, and the party went back to their search. 

Among the remains of a brick tower (likely an old grain silo) they found a nest of some large and missing creature, and among the nest found a veritable treasure trove - expensive pelts, rare and valuable saplings, two strange potions, a map to a dungeon, a magical spear and a magic sword! Hazail the fighter picked it up, and learned that it's name is Ruin to All Cities, and the only thing it desired was to slay the forces of Law. An awkward predicament, considering the 135 Law-aligned warriors presently making camp for the evening on the other side of the ruins. With some discrete fenagling of keeping Hazail and his new sword away from that group, a plan was hatched for the next day.

The next day the whole host set out, first spotting and confirming that they had found the barbarian camp next to the river, right where the Temple of the Sword God was located. The chariots charged right through the camp, killing about a third of the barbarians in just one swoop, but as they wheeled around to charge a second time, the berserkers had managed to organize themselves and counter-charged, losing many in the process but being able to halt the charioteers and turning the entire thing into a horrible, bloody melee. 

Meanwhile the party was trying to approach the camp, when another 40 berserkers, led by a host of five champions and a large individual with a powerful magical aura about him, spotted them and charged them in turn. What proceeded was a running fight of the archers pelting the barbarians as everyone just kept running away, managing to kill the bigger majority of the attackers before they finally caught up with them. 

The powerful man who's aura up close resembled the red of rust and blood, and thousands of swords stabbed into his silhouette cut 3 of the heavy infantrymen that were with the party straight in half with a single fell swoop. Luckily some bad saving throw rolls on the barbarian parts had them falling asleep due to Sargira's magic. The pushing of her magic had cost her quite dearly though, her skin starting to bubble and painfully peel away from her muscles  After the fight had settled the party was somehow miraculously still alive and victorious. Their chariot nomad allies had also managed to finally clear the mass of berserkers as well, though at extremely heavy losses - only 7 of the 45 chariots and their crew were still alive at the end. 

With Sargira passing out from the pain of the magical corruption that had begun in her, the party realized that, indeed, the terrifying warrior who's throat they slit was Conan, and he and his champions were all wielding 6 magical swords, not at all dissimilar to the 3 that the party itself possessed. 

Borrowing an spare horse from the Chariot Nomads the party loaded their loot, swords and sorceress onto it and headed back to town, arriving as the day of the Ritual was about to begin...

Observations

So this was kind of an odd session to organize. My plan for the next (chronological) session is to play out the battle within the Undying City, for which I have actually constructed an entire tabletop wargame! More on that in a future post though.

But while I was still working on the wargame, I didn't want to simply skip a week of gaming, having already skipped two due to a trip out of the country. So after consulting with my players, one of the things they did want to explore (and had been curious about during the last two sessions) was what was the deal with these barbarian attacks, and had Conan actually succeeded in finding the missing sword pieces in Gladio's temple (He had!). 

The fight with the berserkers and the party I handled this time using the, much more elegant than my own, skirmish rules from Marica B's excellent Fantastic Medieval Campaigns. Despite me accidently misremembering the rules and having warband attacks dealing HD instead of HP in damage..the fight was still shockingly close and the party really only survived due to sheer luck of the dice. So even "Easy Mode" ended up feeling quite risky. 

Also with so so many enemies killed, the party had their single biggest exp gain in the campaign so far, with all 3 characters gaining a level at the end of it (the two new ones being level 2 now, and Shimsusa being level 3 and quite far along the path to level 4!) 

While I don't regret going with the 100 exp per HD of enemy defeated rule for this campaign, I do see why in Supplement 1 experience for enemies was cut way way WAY down in OD&D and has been the case for subsequent rulesets of classic D&D. I suspect that in whatever next game I run (either continuing the Serpents of Smoke & Steel or something new) I will definitely be cutting that way down as well. Maybe 20 exp per HD? 10 even? I haven't decided yet.

So, at some point soon, expect a post about this wargame nonsense I've made as well as a report of how it actually played out during the session! 

On Alignment

This came to me as an idea originally when I was watching this excellent video about the history of alignment and the planes. Go check it out! 

So, Alignment. I know, right?! The never-ending font of Discourse™ in which not just the OSR but broader D&D has been swimming in for literally decades. And here I am, joining in that time-honored tradition. 

Alignment is a pretty decent allegory for nationalism. 

Not so much alignment in and of itself, as much as the way alignment has been approached by the people creating and playing D&D over the years. Hear me out.

Alignment comes into D&D through its inclusion by Gygax in his game Chainmail. Below are the alignment charts from Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement and OD&D. Please note that these are basically the same chart, just reproduced twice. 

Chainmail "Alignment".

OD&D Alignment.

Alignment's original purpose was quite simple. In a wargame you need two sides to fight. In Historical Wargaming (which was virtually all wargaming back in Gygax's day really) that is kind of selected for you depending on what battle or time period you are playing in. But in a fantasy game of fantasy creatures, what do you do? Well, you do what Gygax did and simply slap everyone into 3 teams and give them an excuse to fight in a game about fighting. It is, honestly, one of the better game design decisions made by Gygax. 

And from here on out is where the whole "Alignment is like Nationalism" thing starts going. Because while the purpose of alignment - giving you a reason why your dudes should fight other dudes, was clear and concise very soon, within probably a decade at most from it's creation, Alignment started to change.

It started becoming about something more than just having a side so you can punch the dudes on the other side. In B2 the Keep is Law and the humanoids are Chaos. They are barbaric and "non-civilized" and all that other fun stuff you can read about from people who've already written about it. Alignment now could no longer be a simple "us vs them" thing, it had to stand for something greater. It had to Mean Something. 

Just as the process of getting a group of people to think of themselves as a nation, while having a common enemy is more or less a prerequisite (be it The Ottomans, The British or The Jews) sooner or later people come around to invent all kinds of peripheral stuff around it. Art, culture, traditions - things which are either created out of whole cloth or simply repurposed to somehow mean something else now (the meaning being "We are a Nation"). 

Alignment had the same thing happen to it. It started as a simple pretense for violence (again, just like nationalism!) but people were not content with that. It had to Mean Something. Suddenly Law and Chaos were not just a random football team you cheered for, no no. They were  Good and Evil (despite Gygax intentionally not labeling them that in the original version of alignment above). They were about Ethics and Morals and World Views and Cosmic Struggles. 

Suddenly your alignment started to matter a whole lot - Paladins could fall from grace if they acted against their alignment. Which lead to the famous Gygax postulation that a Lawful paladin slaughtering Chaotic orc children is somehow still Lawful and not, ya know, monstrously genocidal and evil (please just imagine that from now on I just add "ya know, just like nationalism" after every statement, because I hope I've made the point clear by now). 

Suddenly there were entire other planes of existence who's purpose was to give Meaning to your alignment. You weren't just "Lawful Good" meaning you were a good boy scout (who murdered the young of thinking people like orcs), oh no! No, there is now an entire infinite plane of existence devoted to the concept of Lawful Goodness. It can't possibly be arbitrary, after all look at how much ink had been spent printing books upon books of details about why your Alignment is totally an important thing and an important part of your character.

And on and on it goes. What's important to note here is that the backlash against Alignment is itself also just something that reinforces this mythologizing of it's importance. People who declare that Alignment is stupid and you can not possibly map ethics and morality onto a 9 point grid are still acknowledging the myth that this nine point grid somehow matters. It doesn't. 

Me though? I don't really dislike Alignment. I used to, mind you. Until I realized what Alignment is actually for. And what it's for is, as was stated earlier, was an excuse to provide you a simple pretense as to why you should fight in a game about fighting. And it does that job perfectly well. 

BSSS - Session 11

 Summary

This session was mostly confused on the final preparations for storming the inner gatehouse of the Eternal Bridge, and the actual fight itself and its consequences.

Characters

• Maru the Witch - 4rd Level Diabolist Sorcerer
• Rajini - 2nd Level Sorceress [Now Dead]
• Athra - 4th Level Fighter
• Gal-Naha the Giant Gecko - 3rd Level Giant Lizard
• Arrim - 1st level Fighter
• Alorus - 1st level Vivimancer Sorcerer

Session Recap

We pick up where we left off last time, with the party returning to the Undying City and using their last week of Downtime to prepare for the upcoming fight. The gatehouse was scouted, people went to buy extra equipment (and also animals for the new sorcerer's trick) and a chance encounter with one of the sorcerer-priests of the Pale Stillness of Justice ended up with him bound and gagged and his and his men's clothes appropriated for ease of entering into the locked down gatehouse.  They also got in touch with a contact for the cult of The Decomposition and agreed that the attack on the gatehouses and the bridge will happen early on the day of the grand procession itself.

There was also so much planning, preplanning and further planning with just trying to figure out how this small group of people are supposed to enter a fortified location and further more - take it over! 

This is where the action takes place.

Finally, as the session was moving ever closer towards its end time, we decided to finally begin with the meat of the scenario. The party managed to bullshit their way through the guards posted right outside the closed doors of the gatehouse, and got access to the inside and talked to the captain in charge of the garrison. However there was also another sorcerer-priest of the Pale Stillness also garrisoned in there (you never know what kind of nonsense can try coming in across the bridge from the old ruins) and he was suspicious of this religious brother of his claiming that there was an imminent Chaos attack that they had only been warned about just now. 

With him claiming to be sent here for back up, he decided now was the time to deploy his secret plan - two poisonous centipedes and 8 rats (the centipedes bought at absurdly inflated prices from a Golden Fraternity merchant specializing in rare and exotic animals) were deployed in the middle of the gatehouse passage, and then he began to cast a spell to transform them into gargantuan and monstrous versions of themselves. As the captain and the sorcerer-priest looked on, the party decided now was the time to strike and blasted the captain with magical lightning, the priest was quickly rushed to knock him out of the fight before he can wipe out half the party with his own magic, and then a bloody brawl began. 

All the while, out in the passageway of the gatehouse, the centipedes and rats kept growing and growing, eventually turning into monstrous and ravenous beasts. The archers deployed on the second floor then used the murder holes in the floor/ceiling and dropped alchemical fire on top of them, turning the small hallway into a living hell of sticky flame, smoke and marauding animals. 

In the ensuing fight several things happened - Maru the sorcerer managed to wipe out a large group of reinforcements coming from upstairs with the use of his Maleficence, Rajini was viciously struck down by several guards and killed on the spot for her attack on the captain, and some of the giant animals that managed to survive being bathed in fire and then shot at by arrows broke down both the city-side and bridge-side doors of the guardhouse and spilled out of there, tearing people, buildings and the bridge apart in their frenzy. The gatehouse was now wide open, with the remaining garrison panicking and retreating. 

The party mopped up the few remaining fighters and then using a Miasma spell they blinded the rest of the garrison that had moved on top of the building (a good defensive position against fighters. Not so great when it comes to magical clouds of demonic energies). 

 Battered, bruised and generally slightly worse for ware, but mostly alive (except the one who died that is) the party looked onto the bridge, seeing the outer and much bigger gatehouse fall before the army of Chaos, as they stormed down the now unprotected bridge (killing off the centipede and remaining giant rat on the way) and then rush into the streets of the Undying City.

The dawn had just broke, and with it the gates of the Temple District were opened and the procession started its ritual, yet unaware of what had transpired on the other side of the city.

Observations

This was quite a different thing for me to both organize and run as a referee. First off this was basically a set piece battle, really more similar in preparation to a wargame scenario than a typical dungeon crawl or exploration adventure. I mapped out the gatehouse, wrote up the garrison involved and even made sure to note on my map where every single person in that garrison was as the encounter began. 

Behold my very messy notes and map!

I really had no idea how the party was going to even do this either. The gatehouse was on lockdown, what with this being the big day and all that. 

Further more the session was run in the evening, rather than the usual Sunday noon time. There was discussion with some of my players and we are going to try doing evening games, which I do enjoy, but have the significant downside of rather strict time limitations - it can only get so late before everyone just starts getting tired and being done. A player, after the session, did raise the point that the tighter timeframe does mean that decisions are more rushed and sloppy. 

I actually agree with him, however for me that is not necessarily a bug in this case. Yes, time crunch means that players need to be way more precise with their plans and how much time they spend actually discussing things during the session, but to me that is, in some ways, just another aspect of the game. How you spend the time we have for the session is part of playing the game. 

Another big topic which was brought out from the session was that of experience points. Now for me it made no sense that any exp be granted for defeating enemies, as this would set a precedent where the party can decide to simply murder people and claim to get experience out of it, and I don't quite like that. So while I had thought about what and how much exp this should give, if any, on the night of the game itself I had kind of settled on it not giving any at all.

However, this I feel was a fault in my role as a referee. What I think is the correct way of handling his would have been to bring up the topic to my other players before the actual scenario was played. And here's why -  Because the point of experience for treasure retrieved and enemies slain, as far as I am concerned, is to provide specific clear goals at any given session as to what moves the characters forward. However this was not a typical session. There was no exploration, no dungeons, no wilderness. It was an assault on a fortified location in, what at least until now, was a friendly city to the party. Therefore the typical metrics of experience (money and monsters) were not valid. 

Conversely though, the party had a very clear and precise goal as to this specific scenario we played out - They needed to neutralize the garrison and also provide access to the Chaos army into the city. They achieved the goal of the scenario quite well I think, so in the end I made the decision as a referee to award each PC with 500 experience for it. I probably would have come to this decision even if it wasn't brought up by the players after the game, but it really should have been discussed beforehand.

With a larger gap between this and the next session, this will hopefully give me the time to discuss the scenario for that one and also what, if any, experience is to be earned from it. I have been re-reading Muster and its point on goal-oriented experience gain is what made me realize that I do think the players should earn experience for achieving the "win condition" of the scenario. 

Also, one of the players decided to not use his current character  for this, but instead made a new one (Alorus the Vivimancer) which I think was also good. I feel it's important that players be able to have multiple characters available that they can use depending on the situation. As long as this is not abused by trying to game the system (which can't happen, because that is what my role as a referee is for) and also those PCs are then treated as "active" in the campaign and therefore provided with accommodations and upkeep, of course. 

Lastly, another thing this session has now done is kind of break the basic structure of my campaign a bit. With this being ostensibly an open table (though with rather a stable core of players for a while now, and not many new faces joining in) each session needs to begin and end at a safe location where new players and party members can be slotted in and out depending on attendance. However right now the next session appears like it would need to take place immediately after this one, thus breaking that chain.

This, I feel, is mostly okay as an exception (and these are exceptional circumstances), though definitely not something I feel should become a regular part of the game.