Wolves Upon the Coast - Session Reports and Observations, part 2

 

 I've started playing in NBateman's Wolves Upon the Coast campaign being run from the Rainbow/Purple OSR Discord.  I wrote another post already which you can find here. This one is going to cover the events of Sessions 4 and 5 (I did not participate in Session 3) as well as my thoughts on those.

  

Current state of our map.

Session 4 + 5

As stated I did not participate in Session 3, but from what other players told me the party made its way to Jork, met with the local king as well as other characters and Albinus, the Christian scholar/monk in our party ended up going north to fight a giant named Thomas (who apparently keeps kidnapping and murdering musicians), using some poison they acquired along the way.

Session 4 begins with my character Thorgo and a few others going north to see what became of Albinus and the Giant. They arrive to a beach littered with corpses - Albinus, Thomas the Giant and also, rather inexplicably, some 30 odd bandits. Everyone except Albinus has their corpses ripped apart, their guts and innards picked at and missing. The party gathers up what treasure they could from the giant's bag, retrieve Albinus's naked corpse and sail back to Jork, along the way running into some crashed ships and potential drowned ghosts, which are promptly ignored.

In Jork the party spread the word of Albinus's deeds and his sacrifice for the people of Jork. The local bishop starts working the crowd and declares that Albinus is a martyr and a saint and the locals begin construction of a shrine in his honor. Meanwhile the king of Jork is happy the problem has been dealt with and gives Stignadr a force of 100 men and 5 ships to return to Rhus and help fight off the Merfolk.

While the army prepares to leave the party splits up, running personal errands. Thorgo goes to the hermit seeking knowledge of magic. The hermit is polite, but says he isn't taking in any apprentices, but directs Thorgo to a witch that he knows, warning him to not seek the path to power. (At that Thorgo politely keeps quiet as he's a guest in this man's hovel). Thorgo was accompanied by 2 NPC crewmates from The Freedom (the name of the karvi that the party began the campaign in). One of them says he's not interested in this magic nonsense and heads back to the group. The other one says he wants to go with Thorgo to learn magic. The two buy a small raft and head up the river, searching for the witch.

Session 5 skips ahead as the fleet has finished mustering and is ready to return to Rhus. Among the Brythonic soldiers are Robert the Stonemason (Also known as Bob the Brython) and Val, both local Christians and replacement PCs for myself and Havoc (Albinus's player). Robert has deeply mid stats, good HP and is incredibly learned, being able to speak fluently Norse and also able to read and write in Brythonic. He is a relatively new convert to Christianity and so is a bit...loose let's say with his interpretations of the holy scriptures, as are the others in the area. He became inspired by Albinus's martyrdom and sacrifice and is going to become a member of the saint cult dedicated to him, for sure.

On the way back to Rhus the fleet encounters an odd sight - an island that was not there a couple of weeks ago as the crew sailed to Jork. The island is covered in hills and an imposing mountain, as well as a port and village which are of strange and alien architecture and completely abandoned.

The fleet stops to loot some gold ornaments off an old boat and those who disembarked have a vision the next morning - the rising sun appears to them as a blazing red eye with a triangle in the center. Bob and Val declare that this is a sign from God and that he clearly looks upon them with favor in the upcoming war with the merfolk. This mostly keeps the crew of the ship content and not panicking.

The fleet proceeds through a narrow channel now formed between the new island and Rhus, and arrive in the fortress of Trecht, where Stigandr, having now returned with an army as promised takes Princess Sophia's hand in marriage.

The next morning there's a war council and the PCs, plus Sophia and Grimmr (the captain of the Jork fleet) decide to go explore this new island in hopes of finding allies against the merfolk, as it was observed that the merfolk avoid going to it since it showed up a few days prior.

The group makes their way to the island, finding the mangled remains of the previous doomed Rhus expedition sent to investigate it by the increasingly mad and demented king. Going into the forest towards the imposing mountain, the party run into the mutilated hanging corpses of beastmen and the drumming of strange drums in the distance. Sophia has enough of this shit and flees, Stigandr running after her to make sure she's safe. The rest of the party, composed of Ingvar and Olaf the vikings, Grimmr the Jork captain, Robert the Brython and Val proceed to the mountain - a strange obelisk of sheer rock, spiky points and no vegetation.

Robert boasts that he will climb to the top of this thing, with the boisterous Grimmr immediately challenging him to a race. Everyone except Val (who is of low constitution and would almost certainly die trying to do this nonsense) decide to have a race, climbing up the mountain in 5 grueling days. Eventually, Ingvar makes a surprise advance and manages to overtake everyone, getting to the top first. All who climb the mountain experience a strange feeling if awe and cosmic insignificance, and find themselves marked with a triangular mark on their shoulder - the sign of the mountain and a potent magical protection.

The climb down, now without any food left, claims Olaf who is lost to the mountain, but the rest descend and meet up with Val. On the day of their descent they also go out hunting, as they are all very hungry, and in the process run into the beastmen, having now captured Stigandr (who had previously stood behind to hold them back as he told Sophia to run away) and experimenting on him, completely mangling his left arm at this point.

The beasts seem in awe of the people who have the mountain's blessing and do not stop them as the party retrieve the barely awake and concious Stig and return to their makeshift camp, giving him food and water, and Robert giving the poor naked man his shirt to keep him warm.

The party try and fail to leave off the island and go back to Rhus, but their attempts at crossing the channel with a raft are thwarted by a flash storm that just does not let up, so eventually Robert declares another boast - he will swim the channel in the storm, reach Trecht and get help. Grimmr, now going stir crazy from doing nothing for 2 days straight, oneups him and proposes another race.

Robert can't do much but agree, and the two men strip naked and dive into the murky stormy waters. Grimmr is lost to the storm, blown out into the open seas, but Robert, exhausted and hurting gets washed up on the shores of Rhus. He pushes through the storm and the night, out of sheer determination and reaches the ruined walls of Trecht. Apparently the battle had been fought and lost there in the time the party were busy racing up a mountain. He runs into a friendly local, tells him about the others stranded on the island then politely collapses from exhaustion.

The next couple of days the party manage to get saved and get back together and hear that the merfolk attacked en masse, destroyed the fortress, but the Jork and Rhus forces managed to drive them off in the center of the island, at heavy losses, but still victorious. The victory was hollow though as the Jork soldiers realizing there's little food simply raided the treasury and abused the local population.

Stigandr, exhausted from his ordeal, renounces his pagan ways and asks to be Christened, which Robert performs himself. The party gather up what they can in The Freedom and make ready to set sail back to Jork. Sophia asking them to send help and food, but the party are doubtful that any help would be of use - Rhus is clearly a cursed and doomed place, and so they just want to get away.

Observations

Fuck this is way longer of a recap than I intended, but so much keeps happening in these sessions that it's hard to cover it all even when condensing things significantly.

I wanted to have Thorgo learn magic from the moment I created him, so this was a great way to get him moving on that direction. Nathan, our Referee, says he's fine with running individual side-sessions for people, so Thorgo will be doing his own adventures. I made Robert as a throw away character to just play in the session, but he now has 3 hit dice, personally had a hand in installing a Christian king on the throne of Rhus (for what that's worth) and has a magical blessing from the weird mountain.  So my stable now has 2 very solid looking characters, which is almost not what I wanted, as now I have to actually put some effort into both of them hah.

Boasting continues to always feel slightly odd - the fact that you declare a boast, then get the bonus, then keep it if you succeed sounds like it should be intuitive, but that's...just not how actual boasting in real life works. You boast to others after the fact about the great deeds you've accomplished. So it just doesn't quite fit, but we seem to be getting the hang of making it work.

The race up the mountain was lots of fun, completely decided on the spot, and also helped underline just how little most of us, who aren't Stigandr, actually cared about Rhus and its fate hah. The race was a series of Constitution attribute tests, which definitely helped underline a broader issue with D&D like games, which that attribute tests are very awkward of a mechanic, in a system that does not focus on raising your attributes.

Val has a CON of 4, which is why his player decided to not even try and run him in the race - he was going to die, 100% guaranteed.  This brought on a good discussion during the game, and is something I've thought about on and off for a while now too.

Broadly speaking, I think that if you are going to have attribute checks be a regular element in your game, then your attributes should be able to be raised above what you rolled initially. Tunnels & Trolls makes that effectively the entire engine of the game, and it works fine and solves the problem.

Another observation is that these sessions have been just absolutely packed with action and events. I suspect that is due to the general density of stuff in the Wolves hexcrawl, more than anything else, but of course that's for our referee to know. But even just the immediate area around Jork appears to be full of giant monsters to hunt, a dungeon and numerous other things. And that is but a tiny speck on the entire hex map that composes the Wolves Upon the Coast campaign setting.

I am definitely interested in seeing how running two different characters will go. I usually use side-characters as mostly just throw aways, and in B/X or other older D&D games that makes sense - when you need XP to level up, playing multiple characters simply means you are diluting your XP per session and thus all of your characters just end up overall weaker.

Well in Wolves there is no exp, and Robert now has more hit dice than Thorgo! So I think that helps people just make new PCs and simply run with them. That and of course our referee being willing to handle multiple PCs and keeping track of the timeline that entails.