The Greylands House Campaign - Session 14

      

Summary 

The party finishes clearing out the prison area on level 6, mostly by being constantly interrupted by wandering monster checks while they're trying to do stuff.

Party Members

• Verasha - Level 5 Druid 
• Pipam the Younger - Level 5 Thief
• von Plarf - Level 3 Elf
• Zoltan - Level 4 Dwarf
• "Rusty" the Talasum - Level 4 Fighter

Followers

Jaro (Verasha's war boar); Grub (Verasha's other war boar); Alois (Porter and Cook); Walter of Potsdam (Man-at-Arms); Tatana (Woman-at-Arms); Baba Tonka (a brown bear); Bluey (War Dog)

Session Recap

After 5 weeks of downtime, spent preparing the party return once more to the prison sub-level on level 6, determined to explore the two final doors they hadn't been through (well they saw what was behind one of them, but didn't want to bother with it at the time).

Beyond the door in the northern part of the dungeon, they found....another door! And a pair of suspicious looking iron statues in the forms of prison guards (hooded faces and menacing looking spiked clubs in hand). With their recent encounters with animated statues, the party decided to test these guys out. They did not seem to respond to being roped, toppled over or even dragged out of their little alcoves. 

Satisfied the party went ahead with the extremely noisy task of using hammers and spikes and crowbars to break apart the statues just in case they do animate once the door they were guarding is open. However the noise kept attracting the weirder denizens of the sublevel, the party having to constantly stop, pelt with arrows/flasks of Sunfire an array of orange jellies, gelatinous cubes, thouls and carrion crawlers.

However, finally, with the statues dismembered (taking off an arm and a leg off of each) Pipam the Younger went to the last unknown door to attempt and open it. The door was locked, as expected, and so the thief settled into try and get the lock picked which...took her close to an hour of failing and retrying. Eventually the lock clicked, her picklocks turned and with that she and Zoltan the dwarf could hear the faint sound of snakes hissing beyond the door.

Calling out to whoever was in there, they only heard muffled and incoherent shouts back. Exercising caution, they used a mirror and one of their Continual Light enchanted coins that power their lanterns now, to check what was in beyond the door. 

Cracking the door slightly, chucking in the coin and looking into the mirror they do, in fact, see a Meduza - a mass of snakes adorned with a woman's face. This one appeared gaunt and starved, and clearly not used to seeing light as the coin made her lose her shit once more. The party quickly slammed and locked the door again.

The last prisoner left in the prison.

Nobody was eager to get petrified by looking at her or try and fight her only to have one of her many, many snakes poison them. So the group devised a plan to make the creature petrify itself with its visage.

Before that though they went and cleared out the four crystalline statues in the room they were trying to get into last session, finding that unfortunately there was nothing else of interest in there except the guardian statues themselves, and a trapped false bottom of a wardrobe that was guarding nothing but dust.

Recruiting a gaggle of the sturdier Talasum and going to level 5, where they took down the large mirrors they found in one of the rooms there, and began the slow and meticulous process of getting those dragged to the prison. Several talasum did end up killed by the various nasties in the dungeon while doing so, but eventually the party had set up a series of mirrors right outside the door of the prisoner. 

Von Plarf was positioned at the end of the series of hallways, armed with a hand mirror and a wand of paralysis as a plan B, while Pipam the Younger took off her armor and equipment, approached the door and, after picking the lock open again, swung it open and ran back as fast as possible.

Soon the Meduza had apparently realized her cell had been opened, and ran out, the party hearing the thunk! and shatter of a mirror being knocked over and falling on the ground, before the approaching hissing and shouting got cut abruptly silent.

Carefully approaching behind the bend, the group found the poor being petrified by her own visage in one of the mirrors, although despite being now entirely made of stone they could still hear the ghostly echoes of snakes hissing and muffled shouting. Clearly the being was cursed in some way, and the group decided to decapitate the statue and break it apart, finally putting her out of her misery for good.

In her cell the group discovered an absurdly large horde of jewelry, the personal possessions of the meduza and with those, along with the parts of the now silent statue, the group returned back up to their manor.

The manor construction efforts were making good progress, with the fortified first floor now completely done, and the wooden timber frames for the second floor being up too. However with the approach of the holiday season, and the celebrations of the Sun Lord's Ascension that marks the beginning of the new year, the party might need to wait for a bit longer before their laborers are willing to finish the building.

GM Observations

So, this was a rather short session mostly focused on fights, of all things. With the prison section of level 6 being occupied by unintelligent and actively hostile creatures like slimes and undead, it really does not offer much in the way of interaction with enemies besides just killing them. A definite issue in the last two sessions, I noticed.

I personally enjoyed the plans the players had for dealing with the iron statues and the meduza. The statues are explicitly written that they only move to stop people if they try and open the door, but not in self defense. So the party simply took them to the side, broke them apart and while, yes, they did animate as Pipam opened the door, all they could do was mostly just....flail around uselessly as the party finished them off.

Lining the hallway leading out of the cell with giant mirrors was also a good plan and even more so, one utilizing a seemingly irrelevant room feature in an upper dungeon floor. However there is no such thing as an irrelevant feature, as anything that exists in the dungeon is subject to being used in creative ways, such as this!

This game is winding down no, with me travelling soon, but it has been an enjoyable and relatively low stress thing focusing on just the one single dungeon.  Plus repairing and reestablishing the fortified manor on top is an excellent long term goal which leaves a notable mark on the land. And while I will likely not be returning my campaign to this specific part of the setting for a while (unless I continue this one of course), it brings me at least satisfaction to know that the manor is there. 

U-Con 2023 - Sunday & Final Thoughts

Last day of the convention and I only had one game.  So I'll go over that, and then some final thoughts about the con overall.

The Cave of Our People 

This game was run by the same GM who ran the Great Egg Race yesterday. The adventure is for Primal Quest, but the GM was using a modified Cairn for the rules. 

The general premise is that the characters are a group of young people from a Neolithic tribe about to undergo the initiation rituals to become adults. 

The premise is fun and enjoyable, however I will say I found the adventure itself quite linear and not all that interesting. There was not a lot to do that wasn't just go from encounter to encounter. The GM himself seemed to struggle with it at times, having to pause to read through the booklet which did kill the pacing of the game on several occasions, but I think a lot of it can be laid at the module itself. 

It wasn't a bad experience or anything, but definitely the low point of the four games I played in during the convention.

Final Thoughts

So, if I had to describe my overall feeling of U-Con 2023 it would be "Good, but not Great".  The convention felt (and was) smaller and a bit less varied in offerings especially in the OSR side of games. It felt like a clearly diminished version of the convention I saw when I was there in 2019 for their 30 year anniversary.

Still, despite all of that, U-Con is an enjoyable convention. having the hotel and convention center be in the same building just makes things feel cozy and intimate. Would I wish there were more and more varied OSR games being run? Yes. Perhaps I should have run one myself, but I kept going back and forth on that and decided against it.

I would overall recommend it to anyone who's in the area and if I had the option to, I would likely attend it in the future too (But I won't, due to life).

U-Con 2023 - Saturday

So, Saturday. Today I went to check out the Vendor Hall. While U-Con didn't have a particularly big one when I was there in 2019, unfortunately this year the place was rather dire. Very few vendors, and most of them selling what could at best be described as "tat" - stuff that is vaguely peripheral to gaming, but that's about it.

Between the pandemic and the proximity to Thanksgiving, this year the convention is rather small and it feels like it. Still, the place where the vendor hall is located is hardly a large room to begin with, as the convention is just more focused on playing games than buying them.

And speaking of which, today I was only in one game. 

The Great Egg Race - Three Racoons in a Trench Coat

Finally made it to the eggs!

The game was run by Brett Slocum. The concept is simple - we divide into two teams of three, and each team is, in fact, three racoons hidden in a trenchcoat. As a friendly challenge we go into a human supermarket to get some eggs and abscond with them. The trio with the most eggs gets bragging rights.

It was a fun party game, honestly something very much in the style of Honey Heist. Our team went for a much more chaotic approach, taking jars off shelves and throwing them at the other team, at their cart and in the end - at the supermarket security! Not much to really say about it, except that it's a decent idea for a short con-game and worth running if you want something like Honey Heist, but with racoons instead of bears.

All in all a fairly chill convention day. Unfortunately with the vendor hall being what it is, there is not much else to do, except I suppose play board games. 

Last day of the con tomorrow.

U-Con 2023 - Friday

 Inspired by Warren's posting about ReaperCon earlier this year, I decided I'll try and post about my experience attending U-Con this year. I was at this convention once before in 2019 and really enjoyed it, so here we are for a second go!

U-Con in General

A small-ish local convention in Michigan, U-Con definitely has an atmosphere I can best describe as "cozy". It reminds me of some of the German cons I've been to, where it's a small group of people hanging out in the same hotel and gaming. 

The reason I like U-Con in particular is that it has a dedicated OSR/NSR track for gaming, and in fact I have signed up for 4 games this time. In 2019 the con was a lot more bustling and with a lot more OSR stuff going on. This year things are a bit more subdued, mostly for obvious pandemic-related reasons affecting numbers in the past few years.

Game 1 - Dr. Penderghast Must DIE!

First thing I played in was a DCC level-0 Funnel. Some teenagers from our local Carpathian village have been kidnapped by Dr. Penderghast, so off we go to form an angry mob and storm his mansion. The game was a fairly typical Funnel fare - lots of deaths, lots of traps and things jumping at you from places you would not expect them to (best one probably being a stained glass window depicting knights and demons animating those figures and coming down to fight us). 

The finally encounter with the doctor was a suitably dramatic thing - his Beast, a giant two-headed gorilla rampaging as we are desparately trying to free the teens and kill everyone else. The doctor, after being (seemingly) killed shooting lasers out of his eyes and his head splitting in half to reveal a floating brain with eyeballs that kept on fighting. Classic stuff, very much inspired by old Universal horror movies. 

All in all I enjoyed the funnel, even if I don't think it offered anything specificlly unique to the medium. The classic horror themeing works well with DCC Funnels though, so that was definitely a big plus! 

The game was run by Joshua Burnett, who is said he is planning on relesaing this eventually as a third-party DCC module. He has other things already published as well that you can check in the link I just posted. 

Game 2 - Hidden Hand of the Horla, 5th Anniversary 

The second game I played in (starting at 8 pm no less!) was an OSE adventure about exploring a giant hand-shaped tower of the Hand Mage (appropriate) which vanished some 1000 years ago and has now reappeared. 

The game was run by Ryan Thompson of Appandix N Entertainment who is also one of the U-Con orgnizers and the person in charge of the OSR/NSR track for the convention. 

We had 10 players in the game (would have been 12 except some people were too tired to join) and surprisingly we finished the thing in about 2 and a half hours of the 4 alloted. We fought many goatpeople, had a prolonged and frankly silly fight with some flying books (A fight which my fighter simply noped out of, since in the first round of combat 3 of the books rolled fumbles and managed to destroy themselves, so he decided this was not really something worth his time) and winged serpents.

The game was quite snappy, as the GM has plenty of experience running large games (he mentioned he'd run a game for 20 people at one point) and also the module itself was quite compact and clearly useable for a convention game.

That last part is not surprising to me, as the whole "5th anniversary" thing in the title is because this is the 5th year in a row that he's run this module at the convention! 

I really enjoyed this game, and in fact bought the module for it, which I plan on writing up a review of in the near future. The adventure works great as a one-shot, and also has potential setup for a longer, plane-hopping campign (there is apparently another module in the works that ties in with this one). 

Also the game was ran using the GM's own Gateway to Adventure houserules for OSE, including classes like very Gloranthan Duck people, a Leprechun and others. 


So, the first day of the convention was overall quite nice, I will post later today (hopefully) about my Saturday experience! 

The Greylands House Campaign - Sessions 12 and 13

     

Summary 

The party meet with the head priest of the Elemental Chaos cult and discuss a truce and potential alliance. They also get rid of the living statues on level 5. They then go and explore the abandoned prison and spend over a month of downtime preparing for upcoming delves.

Party Members

• Verasha - Level 4 Druid 
• Pipam the Younger - Level 4 Thief
• von Plarf - Level 3 Elf
• Zoltan - Level 4 Dwarf
• "Rusty" the Talasum - Level 4 Fighter

Followers

Jaro (Verasha's war boar); Grub (Verasha's other war boar); Alois (Porter and Cook); Walter of Potsdam (Man-at-Arms); Tatana (Woman-at-Arms); Baba Tonka (a brown bear); Bluey (War Dog)

Session Recap

Anna and her warriors returned to act as a guide to the party on the way down into the temple. She showed them how to navigate the parts of level 6 that the temple were establishing as part of their territory along with various hazards (like the room full of gargoyles) to avoid. The group also met some of the other mercenaries employed by the temple, such as a group of magic-users. They also found out a secret door short cut that allowed them to quickly reach the staircase leading down into the temple proper.

The staircase, the party noticed, was quite new construction. Apparently an ooze of some kind had fallen through into the temple during a ceremony, destroying the old staircase and just making a big mess of things in general. 

Once they were down on level 7, the party found themselves in the Temple of Elemental Chaos. The central ritual space looked surprisingly homely with a big ceiling and tapestries on the walls as well as altars and benches. The group were greeted by the head priest, a man by the name of Marek and his entourage. He greeted them the group and offered to go talk in his office. 

Due to the priest politely asking that the animals are not brought into his nice bed chambers and office, Verasha stayed behind to keep them in check, while the rest of the party followed the high priest. Along the way they stopped at the Air Chapel, presided over by Emilia - a hideous harpy that acted as second priestess to Marek. The group then went into their private chambers to discuss what the whole situation was.

Marek explained that their temple was dedicated to the elemental forces of nature itself, the grand and powerful things like hurricanes, fires, earthquake and such that Chaos, being the primal matter of which all existence spawned, created when unbridled and unrestrained. Their beliefs, along with their practice of human sacrifice, was viewed as evil and heretical by the dominant cult of the Sun God, and so they had found themselves out into the Greylands just as many other heretics and pagans have. 

The reasons the temple were offering a truce with the party were two fold. On one hand, the temple recognized the party as not being particularly pious Solarists either (what with one of their members being a Druid), and so Marek felt there was some connection there. The second was the servants of a black wyrm named Dulwin had approached the temple from below, with an offer to submit to their draconic master. The temple had refused and murdered the emissaries, and were seeking allies to help with the inevitable retribution coming from deeper into the dungeon. 

That, combined with the fact that the party were clearly powerful enough to have cleared out and be able to hold the first 4 floors of the structure, was why the temple was now seeking a truce and potential mutual assistance in the future.

After appearing politely receptive to his pitch, the head priest also showed the group around the rest of the temple, as well as saying there was an old abandoned prison that one could access from the temple, that the temple members themselves avoided due to various creepy crawlies seeming to spawn in there. They extended an invitation to the party to go explore it if they wish, and the party took them up on their invitation.

After a week of preparations and rest, the group descended back through the temple and up into the prison. Exploration was slow and careful, which was helpful as the party almost ran directly into a gelatinous cube on two occasions! Luckily their liberal use of Sunfire and retreating+shooting arrows helped dispatch both of those. One even had gotten some very expensive looking jewelry in it, Sun God knows where from. 

Exploring deeper into the prison the party found a door marked with a strange, but ultimately meaningless, symbol and exploring around the place managed to find the button that opens into a secret room containing two coffers. Cautious with what happened the last time someone touched a treasure chest without examining it first. After prodding them with a pole and giving the time for Pipam the Younger to examine them they found the coffers to be locked, but not containing any traps. They opened one to find it containing a splendid bejeweled scroll case. Deciding it was smarter to do this not in the middle of a hostile dungeon, the group dropped off the two coffers by the stairs, and went back to finally unlock and peek what was behind the door with the strange symbol.

As it turns out, that was when a group of the gaunt and strange looking talasum descended on the group, but with a Web spell that von Plarf had recently learned from the Greytown wizard, the group managed to isolate them and deal with them without much trouble. 

Now, finally (again), the group opened the blasted door, finding a bedroom and office beyond it, with a crystal statue in each of the corners. As soon as Zoltan had set foot in the room, the statues (almost predictably) began to move and approach him. The group slammed the door shut and decided to just leave (von Plarf taking a chance to add some extra lines to the sigil on the door, making it appear like a man with a large penis). 

With a big haul from their trip (6080 gp worth of jewels, fancy scroll case, gemstones and coinage) along with a scroll containing some very powerful and useful spells (Continual Light, Knock and Fireball), the group decided to settle in for a long bit of downtime.

Verasha took Baba Tonka and the rest of the animals and travelled back to her hidden village home, where with the help of the head priestess of the Wild Temple, she concocted a ritual that magically enchanted the bear's claws, allowing her to harm things that would normally be untouchable for her. 

While that was going on, Rusty had gone off on tour of the taverns and drinking holes of Greytown, indulging in his compulsive need to sort household goods and arranging their bottles and jugs of alcohol in nice and neat ways, drinking himself into a stupor along the way and then needing to spend over a week of getting the alcohol out of his system.

Von Plarf had settled in to copy the two spells off the scroll that she could cast, and then started to cast Continual Light on a bunch of things, eventually replacing the party's oil lanterns with custom-made hooded lanterns that could house the enchanted glowing coins and have a little door that can be closed to stop the light from coming through. 

Finally, after selling off the jewelry from the gelatinous cubes through her contact in the Thieves Guild, Pipam the Younger met with the Master Thief of the guild and convinced him to allow her to purchase one of the rare Thief's Candles . She also told him about the black wyrm lurking beneath the earth, and the promise of a dragon's horde made the Master Thief say that she and her party could come to talk to him once they decided if they want to approach the monster, and he might be willing to offer them some manpower and assistance in exchange for a cut of the treasure.

GM Observations

An extra long post this time around, because oh man have the last two weeks been a lot. With so many disruptions due to real life the game kind of broke down into several small sessions, as we basically played whenever we could. This is why this is a combined report for what I am at least counting as two distinct sessions, but in practice was more like 5 scattered around the last two weeks. 

So, finally the party made contact with another proper faction in the dungeon, the Temple of Elemental Chaos (no relation to the other Temple of fame. Or maybe there is. They haven't asked. Maybe it's a franchise location?) and are left in a strange position where these guys are clearly very evil (and making little to no attempt to hide it), yet also not someone the party actively needs to fight against either. 

Beyond that, my main observation was that oh boy the prison area had a lot of fights. For a 1 in 8 chance of a wandering monster appearing, the party hit three over the course of the session! That turned out to be a stroke of luck though, as the second gelatinous cube was generated with a frankly absurd amount of treasure carried within it. That's where all that money came from! 

As for the downtime stuff, this was a rather interesting proposition. The party want to go fight some gargoyles. Gargoyles are immune to non-magical attacks. The party has, between all of them, only 3 magical weapons which is probably okay to take on one gargoyle, but more than that would be outright suicidal to try and fight. Plus the party's best fighter, Baba Tonka the grizzly bear, can't hit them.

So using my already existing rules that allows magical characters of level 4 or higher to spend money and time to create minor enchantments on weapons (effectively just giving them a bonus to hit and damage without any other special abilities) I made the ruling that Verasha, being a Druid, could use this same downtime procedure to enchant her bear's claws, rather than one weapon. We also established that the reason the Hidden Village can do that is that they use this magical ritual to enchant the tusks on the war pigs birthed/gifted to them by Svine. 

The other thing I had to make a ruling on is Continual Light. It is such a strange spell. From what I read in the OSR description, the spell is permanent until broken in some way, and can be cast on as many objects as on wishes. This means that with a downtime of a week a magic-user or cleric that has it can effectively remove the need for more mundane lighting from the game. Of course stuff like torches still have the use of being an open flame, and a regular oil lantern can be turned off more easily, but still...what a spell.

In a play by post game I ruled that a magician can only maintain as many Continual Light spells as their level, but that also makes it weird because then you couldn't, say, pay someone else to cast it for you. Or you could be very restrictive and say that only one spell per caster can ever be ongoing, but at that point this is a spell which is cast once and then never again, making it kind of a lame proposition. 

I will have to figure out how I want to rule this in future games, but for this looser house game that this campaign is, it is fine.