OD&D Character Sheet (Based in my BSSS one)

 I realized I hadn't actually shared this on here. I made a custom character sheet for my OD&D campaign! It was an interesting design challenge and also this way I knew it had what I needed on it, instead of trying to retrofit an existing one, 

And here it is! 

You can download a full resolution copy >>HERE<<.

 I decided to also make a generic version without my game's logo and border and such in case someone wants to use it for their OD&D game (someone was asking about it to begin with, so here we are.) 

You can download a full resolution copy >>HERE<<.

So hey, if anyone ends up using this for their game, please write to tell me about it! 
 

P.S.: Oh one final note. These are sized for A4 paper, because I live in a sane country. But I've printed it on US Letter sized paper and honestly it fits fine enough! 

Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel - Campaign Retrospective and Lessons

 This post has taken way longer than I intended. A combination of a busy schedule and having too many disparate thoughts has resulted in it being dragged through most of the month. This post will also be kind of a long one, as I go through my scatted thoughts and observations on running my OD&D campaign.

Setting

I generally have (or had) a fascination with ancient history and fantasy inspired by it. I have been a fan of Glorantha for years and worked on the setting for quite a few years as well. When I decided to use Ancient Messopotamia for broad inspiration for my OD&D campaign it seemed like a bit of a no-brainer to me. It's stuff I like, it's stuff I am broadly familiar with, and as I made a point to say in the setting primer, it is conversely not something I plan on being too strict about. Perhaps I should have been though. 

While I am hardly unhappy with the setting, and I think it definitely had its own distinct feeling when compared to the Greylands, I do feel like a lot of the broader "vibe" of it being set in an ancient world didn't quite come through as strongly as I was expecting. 

The realization as to why that is came only after the fact and with the campaign over. Part of it is that for me the big draw to the ancient world is aesthetic, and specifically - visual aesthetics. I like the look of the buildings, the outfits, the material elements. And those are very hard to get across in an oral medium like RPGs unless I spend way way too much time describing how random things look, or just carrying way too many visual aids. The other part of it has to do with what I said above - I did not push the setting deep enough into being an actual ancient feeling world. While there was some of it - no anachronistic backpacks, no crates and barrels, etc, I am unsure of how well the feeling came through. 

Something I did quite enjoy in the setting was putting Law and Chaos in more a prominent and central role. Drawing from the pulp inspirations that lead to their inclusion in OD&D in the first place I made both of them be quite tangible and relevant forces in the lives of the PCs - after all the game kind of peaked at a battle of Law vs Chaos in the players' homebase city! That said, I also think I got this out of my system and I am quite alright with not bothering with alignment for the foreseeable future. Or maybe just not in such a direct way if I do. 

For example I quite enjoyed how Chaos was presented in the Greylands A mix of its writeup in Jason Sholtis's Operation Unfathomable and the Weird from the Hill Cantons (which makes sense, as the Greylands are very much my own riff on the Hill Cantons). A sort of primal force of existence which is not really evil or even always dangerous, but definitely tends to make things worse for most normal living things. This also tracks with the conception of Chaos in, say, Ancient Greece which I am familiar with as well. 

System and Referee Stuff

The whole point of the BSSS campaign (and not just going back to running the Greylands once I came back home from the US) was for me to play around with OD&D as a system and explore what that offers when compared to B/X. As such, I would argue that this experiment in system exploration was thoroughly successful! 

There were two main things I wanted to test out, system-wise in OD&D, in the campaign. First was having a very very limited choice of classes. While the Greylands has a lot of class options and even more are unlocked through play, BSSS only had two - Fighters and Sorcerers. The second thing was having all HD and damage dice be just d6. 

Limited Class Choice

In order to emphasize the Sword and Sorcery vibe (the success of which was I think mixed at best) I decided to simply have just two classes - Fighters and Sorcerers! Explicitly Sorcerers too, not Magic-Users, as I decided to use the brilliant Wonder & Wickedness for the magic system in my game, rather than the usual spell list found in OD&D. You can find the details on what each of the classes can do in my Player's Document, but the short and long of it is that there was broadly an even split between Fighters and Sorcerers, with Fighter being slightly more overrepresented among the PCs. (Although the regular group mostly consisted of Sorcerers despite this)

The super limited choice did make character generation much easier, but honestly I don't know if I really prefer it over the "just have tons of classes, who cares?" approach of the Greylands. As such I think I probably will go back to having a bunch of classes, rather than just two like I did here.

D6 All the Way Down

This was the bigger thing I wanted to try out, and I'd say I was very satisfied with the results. In OD&D hit dice and damage dice are all the same - d6. Some classes have a bonus to their HD, some don't, but it doesn't matter. There is just something nice about the symmetry in having both dice be just d6 by default. It makes weapons choice a lot less of a "just pick the thing which has the highest dice number on it", it also makes running larger combat much simpler as I can simply roll a number of d6s equal to the enemies and simply use those to track their HP, rarely if ever having to record anything. 

Additionally, a sort of unintended (or maybe it is intended? I don't know) consequence of all of this was the fact that I can also run much, much larger scale fights in OD&D with relative ease and speed when compared even to B/X. Skirmish rules, either ones I came up with myself or better ones that Marcia B came up with allow you to seamlessly shift between handling entire gangs of 5 or 10 NPCs or Mercenaries to one-on-one combat without having to change any system or even roll differently than you would do in either case. 

Plus, there is just that appeal there to the wargamer in me of just needing a handful of d6s and some d20s to run the game. It took some time for players to really adjust to it and there were some unsure and questioning glances at me as I was explaining it at the beginning of the campaign, but i think by the end people were just used to it and it worked quite smoothly. 

This is one that I probably will not implement back into my B/X games (unless I do. Who the fuck knows?) but if I am running anything OD&D adjacent, then I am sticking to d6s for all the things, thank you. 

Experience Points 

So, a quick recap on how experience is gained in OD&D. There are two ways. One is equal to the amount of treasure you retrieve in gold pieces (the standard XP for GP thing in the OSR), the other is by earning 100 experience points per HD of enemies defeated. Those values are then modified by a formula that takes into account the ratio between your level and the level of the dungeon, making it so you can't just "farm" easier dungeon levels for exp, you have to head deeper. 

Well...that's all well and good, except I was running an open sandbox game with loads of different dungeons and locations, and most of the fights actually happened in the overland travel portions. I don't have a dungeon level to modify this by. So I decided, as I was writing my player rules, to just simplify it. 1 GP = 1 XP and 1 HD = 100 XP. There. Simple and clean. The result of this, combined with relatively easy access to mercenaries and running into large groups of enemies very early on in the campaign meant that the experience gained during the sessions was actually very high.

In multiple sessions the party gained 6k to 7k of experience, almost all of it from fighting enemies. Turns out, when you have a decent sized warband and also Sorcerers that can use Maleficence to wipe out large groups of enemies with ease, it's actually very very easy to defeat much larger groups of opponents. The party had run into 60+ enemies on regular occasions and managed to come out victorious (though usually through very good luck). 

This is not, inherently, a problem. But it is definitely a factor I had to keep in mind. The game, after 14 sessions (13 + a wargame) had, by it's end, multiple level 4 PCs. This rate of leveling actually almost outpaced the one in my Greylands game, and in that one character started with 2500 exp upon creation and gained xp from treasure at a x10 rate! 

The main factor in this I think comes not actually from the high exp per individual HD (though that doesn't help) but rather the actual circumstances within the fiction. The party were never really rich, but had enough cash on hand to hire more or less as many mercenaries as they needed. Combined with Sorcerers being able to deal massive damage, as I said above, and the lack of enemy spellcasters in those encounters very much lead to strangely one-sided fights. 

I think in any future OD&D game I would slash the XP from enemies, making it so that the party gains only 10 XP per HD. I have enjoyed having a slightly accelerated rate of leveling in my two campaigns, as they both have had natural end points for their existence, and thus I wanted players to get at least some idea on what progression is (or often, isn't) in these games. However I have a growing desire to run a much longer and therefore slower campaign, and so experience gain will have to be addressed for that to happen. 

Again, this is not really a problem. Having high level PCs doesn't make the game any less tense or interesting! But it does mean that stuff like dungeons and other locations now no longer present a meaningful challenge once most of the party is level 3 and up. That itself is also related to me extensively using other people's modules and dungeons, rather than designing ones myself. It's telling that the one dungeon that the party lost a high level character were the sunken ruins...which is also the one that I have designed myself. Speaking of losing characters...

Lethality 

With the game using OD&D as an engine, starting at level 1 and all that, I expected the game to be rather lethal, especially combat. I did give a small concession to the players in letting all newly made PCs to start at Max HP, but that only matters for one session, as after that everyone simply rerolls all their Hit Dice at the beginning of the next session anyway. 

Turns out - I was way off! While the first session did have 3 characters die, it was due to a combination of a trap and poor handling of said trap by the players, not combat. In fact from the 7 dead characters (out of 18 total) only 3 actually died in combat. While almost 50% lethality is hardly safe, especially compared to my Greylands campaign which used a Death & Dismemberment table, I actually expected it to be way way higher than this still. 

The reason for it is, I think, quite simple - it's a numbers game. The PCs usually had a good amount of mercenaries on hand, and so they would be able to overwhelm a lot of enemies. In all 3 cases of a character being killed in combat, it happened in tight, enclosed spaces where the PCs did not have the ability to outnumber the enemy. 

Similarly to the fast experience again above, this is not really a problem, more just an observation. I don't particularly care about a game where PCs keep dying every session, since that just sounds like it will get kind of repetitive and dull a bit too quick. 

Phased Combat and Miniatures

For this campaign I wanted to lean into the more wargaming feel that I think OD&D is quite suited for. As such I used miniatures to help visualize more complex fights, marching orders and such. I didn't use a grid or tiles or any of that - just miniatures and a tape measure.

I also used a miniatures wargaming-style phased combat for my fights, which you can find in the player's document. (Note: The document had some revisions as play went on, but I haven't edited them in. The relevant here is that movement and the first missile combat phases were swapped and it worked much better this way.) 

Phased combat, I think, worked quite well. It stops all this "action economy" nonsense that everyone goes nuts about in games like 5E, Pathfinder and what have you, and simply lets you just...act depending on when and what you want to do. I plan on using some form of wargaming-styled phased combat rounds in my next campaign too, though whether it'll be the same or different, I don't yet know! 

Personal Highlights

I feel it's important to also talk about things I really personally enjoyed as a referee of the game. There were loads of fun moment, interesting twists and such - all hallmarks of a good campaign. However, I want to highlight 3 specific things.

Thing 1 - Session 11 and the party trying to take down the garrison in one of the Undying City's gatehouses. This was a very single-focused session. There was no dungeon to explore, no overland travel to plan for and deal with. Just a singular mission with a clear goal - incapacitate the garrison and open the doors to the gatehouse.

The somewhat frantic planning that the party did, their cobbled together plan that actually managed to work and then the fight (which claimed Rajini the Sorceress, one of the few deaths in combat). I personally don't really like long, protracted combat in my RPG sessions, as I might have mentioned. 

However, I feel that if everyone involved knows that the focus of the given session is going to be a complex fight with lots of maneuvering  then it can, and I think did, produce an enjoyable gameplay session. As I talk about in the Observations section in the session report, it lead to me pondering experience gain and mission or objective based experience gain in the context of an OSR sandbox game, plus it lead to my next favorite thing -

Thing 2 - Battle of the Undying City. This was an almost feverish inspiration, a Dwarf Fortress-like Fey Mood taking me over for a few days. Those are mentally and physically exhausting, but so so rewarding. I love campaigns that tackle different things - wargames, dungeon crawling, exploration of unknown areas, mini-games etc. And I am so so happy with the tabletop wargame I designed, created all the elements for and then also assembled into an actual physical game that I now have and can (and will) play again as a stand-alone wargame.

That is not something I ever thought I'd be doing when I started this campaign, but it it was an absolute pleasure to make, to play with several people before the actual session for which it was intended (and see its potential as a wargame in its own right) and then to also have the "official" game of it as part of the campaign also go quite well, with interesting twists and turns in the tide of battle. 

I don't know if I'll be making another tabletop wargame any time soon. But I do hope that whatever game I run next will give me the inspiration to make something like this.

Thing 3 - The last highlight for me is actually a character death. A curious thing to highlight, I know, considering I was the referee and, to some degree, responsible for it happening. Specifically, I am talking about the death of Esho the Necromancer and the emotional impact it had on me, on Esho's player and honestly on the other players in the game. 

Esho was kind of a linchpin of the group. He was created in Session 1 and kept going since then, a core member of the adventuring company and a constant presence in whatever the group was doing at the time. His death was also quite sudden, brutal and out of nowhere, even for myself.

A sorceress, a member of a rival adventuring party who's territory the PCs had unknowingly stumbled into, managed to run into Esho as he was distracted, his back turned to her (she was invisible anyway, though his sorcerous sight would have allowed him to see her..if he hadn't failed his roll) and separated from the rest of the party.  She backstabbed him with a magical dagger, her goal not really to kill him, as much as just hurt him, mark him with the dagger for tracking later and then run away. Instead though the damage on the attack was...very high. Like absurdly good roll on my part, and so Esho instead was dropped to 0 HP and failed his Death Save (a mechanic that I put in the game and then failed to save basically every person who ever rolled it) and so, just like that, had been killed.

The party's panicked response turned to sadness, as everyone just felt kind of...bummed really that Esho was now gone. As a final act of respect to their friend and companion his body was given to the Daughter of the Sea, which the party had just liberated from her fountain prison a few moments before he was killed, and she carried him away in her tender embrace. 

From there, the player played different characters, and did actually say that the death and it's emotional impact were quite exhilarating, but you could actually feel Esho's absence in the campaign. The constant presence that he was now felt like a hole every time the party ran into something undead and there wasn't Esho around to gleefully run towards it in a desire to figure it out and bend it to his will. 

Another player mentioned, weeks later, that he almost felt responsible for Esho's death, because he hadn't stayed with him out in the hallway but instead went with the party into a separate room. 

This kind of emotional response, for me, is what makes OSR games really stand out. The kind of honest feelings of loss and regret that come from a character you didn't just come up with yesterday, but watched build up slowly over time, of weeks and weeks of play. And as such it is the absolute highlight of the campaign for me, even more than any of the others. 

Lastly, STATS! 

I know probably nobody but me gives a single fuck about this stuff, but I love keeping track of random stats for my campaigns. Posting the stats for my last campaign is one of the reasons this blog even exists in the first place! So fuck it, we're doing this! Have some stats! 
 

Total players in the campaign: 11

Of which played in at least two sessions: 9

Total characters in the campaign: 18

Most players in a single session: 6

Dead characters: 7

Dead retainers: 11

Longest surviving character: Maru the Witch

Highest level reached: Level 4

Class breakdown: 10 Fighters, 8 Sorcerers

Highest amount of experience gained in a single session: 7760

In-game time elapsed: 10 months

Money spent on carousing: 1300 silver

Single most valuable treasure looted: Statue of the Sea Queen, 2000 silver

Single most powerful item found: The Nine of Swords

Magic swords found: 2

Magical corruptions acquired: 5

Toughest enemy defeated (outside the wargame): Conan, a 7th level Fighter.

Dungeons explored: 7

Of which "cleared": 2

Hexes of Interest visited: 7

Total hexes traveled: 24

Number of demi-gods met: 2

Number of portals to other worlds found: 1

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, I enjoyed putting together and running this OD&D campaign. The theme left me a bit cold, much to my surprise, and the system was deeply enjoyable. For my next campaign I will probably return to B/X as my system of choice, though I expect a number of ideas spawned from this game to make their way into the next one too. 

Oh and if you read all of this blather and/or any of my session reports as the game was ongoing? Thank you! 

BSSS - Session 14

Summary

The campaign goes on pause and the Hedgehogs of Mercy settle in after the big battle. 

• Shimsusa the Archer - 3rd Level Fighter
• Enlil - 1st Level Elementalist Sorceress
• Alorus - 1st Level Vivimancer Sorcerer
• Maru the Witch - 4th Level Diabolist Sorcerer
• Athra - 4th Level Fighter

Session Recap

After the battle produced a relatively clear victor the party got to have some Downtime in order to handle everything that happened. The first thing they did was to go inspect the Pale Portal housed in the previously unvisited section of the city, beyond the Temple District. 

Said district was itself being in the process of being utterly demolished. The Great Temple dedicated to the Pale Stillness of Justice, the Law-aligned patron of the city, had shattered by itself upon the death of the Voice of Stillness during the battle, and the subsequent magical energies released from the disrupted ritual. However, the powers of the Decomposition didn't feel like leaving things half-done, and so employed their forces to systematically level and desecrate all the temples there, permanently severing the city's connection to it's patron.

The Hedgehogs of Mercy were offered a selection of various magical items the chaos priests had found as they were doing their work, allowed to pick one as gratitude for their assistance in the battle. After some deliberation the party picked a masked iron helmet in the shape of a wolf's head. Once they walked past the new gutted gatehouse, they found themselves in the part of town unseen by most. 

The party of the city where the Pale Portal is located.

The entire section of the city was just a field, with no houses or buildings, and from wall to wall covered in the bleached bones of countless dead, along with some more recent corpses. In the middle of it all stood the Pale Portal itself, a 4ish meter tall structure of stone and bones, in the middle of which was a silvery glittering substance which seemed to block the view of anything behind it.

The Pale Portal itself.

After some experimenting and going back and forth through it, Alorus the Vivimancer decided to just go right in. First he stepped through into a dark room, and once he went back and got a lamp, stepping through a second time resulted in him falling through the portal and out into a clear sky. He was, for all intents and purposes, gone. 

Meanwhile the rest of the city was in lower c chaos too. Bel of the Lotus, the vampire noble and friend of the party, had gathered the remaining nobles of the Undying City and went on a killing spree of his own - finishing off as many of the old priests of the Pale Stillness that they could find, along with their retinues and, of course, a bunch of just random people standing by because why not? In the end he declared himself the new ruler of the Undying City, his claim backed by surviving noble houses ( who were eager to actually get back to having any real power) the Golden Fraternity (who were quite happy to have an actual noble from the actual old Empire in power) and the priests of the Decomposition (who were willing to allow him to do that since he seemed uninterested in reestablishing the city's connection with the forces of Law). 

The characters were invited to the talks, and Bel offered to essentially have the entire company of the Hedgehogs join him as his personal bodyguards and advisors. Everyone agreed, with Athra the fighter even being arranged a marriage into one of the noble houses, as an opportunity to get him into the Noble caste and from there allow him to achieve what he wanted in the long term - control over the armies of the city. 

Shimsusa the Archer, while thankful for the offer, decided to instead travel back south to the Bastion of the Raging Bull with intentions of joining the Bull Guards and Utu. When she arrived, awaiting for her at the inn the party had stayed at was an ominous threat, clearly from the invisible assassin that had slain Esho a few months ago. 

Observations

Well, this is it for now. I was planning on keeping the campaign going for another 3-4 sessions, before I have to leave for a few months and thus will be unable to run it. However, the next month and a half is shaping up to be rather busy and the situation in the campaign has gotten rather complex, with multiple factions and different elements all requiring more attention than I have available. 

My players seem to be generally okay with ending it here, especially after the high note of the big battle last session. It just makes for a natural break point. I have some plans on running Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel for other people while I am in the US, and if that happens I will be posting recaps of that as well, however the in-person game is now on hold. Will I come back to it? I have no idea. 

I do plan on writing up some overall campaign impressions for this in the coming month or so, similar to the ones I posted about the Greylands, my previous campaign. I also have plenty of broader observations about the game - from system to setting and simple GM organizational stuff, which will hopefully be interesting for at least someone else to read!  

And this is it. The Hedgehogs of Mercy (god what a ridiculous name!) are, for now, in retirement. 

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. 

BSSS - Session 10

 Summary

The Hedgehogs of Mercy return to their home in the Undying City, after a cryptic and urgent missive from Bel of the Lotus, the vampire they freed months ago. Turns out things are going down in the city, very very big things - the people of the city are on the cusp of being turned into silent undead if someone doesn't stop the ritual that is taking place. 

Characters

• Shimsusa the Archer - 2nd Level Fighter
• Maru the Witch - 3rd Level Diabolist Sorcerer
• Rajini - 2nd Level Sorceress 
• Athra - 4th Level Fighter
• Gal-Naha the Giant Gecko - 3rd Level Giant Lizard

Session Recap

Esho's player had decided that instead of making a new character, he will simply take on Esho's stalwart Companion Shimsusa the Archer and use her as his current PC. With that handled, the party also received a letter from the vampire Bel who they had freed several months ago in their visit to the Temple of Gladio. The message was cryptic and told them that he's in the Undying City and wants to talk to them in person about something big that is afoot. The party took a vote and decided to ignore the dungeon they had been to last few times, finish up their business in the Bastion of the Raging Bull and take a ship back home. On a more cheery note though, they did learn that the reconstruction efforts of the river shrine to the Serpent of Smoke had finally come to an end and the shrine was now fully operational with a small temple and everything. River sailors and merchants had mentioned just how calmer and smoother travel down the river was now. 

As they arrived back in the Undying City, the Hedgehogs were met with tension in the air. The docks were now full of way more guards than was usual and the northern gate out of town was permanently closed. The reason, they soon learned, was that large bands of Northern Barbarians had started appearing sporadically, slaughtering anyone and anything they can catch outside the walls then disappearing back out into the grasslands. 

Returning back to the mansion they were greeted by Bel who over lunch decided to catch up with them, see how their adventures have been going since they parted ways in the temple of Gladio, and also tell them why he wrote to them. As the new year had just begun and the wet season was finally over, the city was gearing up (barbarians or not!) to do the traditional celebrations to welcome the new year. Except this time, the celebrations were going to be different - some of the high priests of the Pale Stillness of Justice, the Lord of Order who was the "protector" of the Undying City, were going to lead the ceremony personally. And Bel, while not having enough sources to figure out what their goal was, knew that something big was going to happen. That these were plans by the Pale Stillness to cement its grip over the city once and for all and make it into a permanent bastion of for the forces of Law. 

Bel, being a former noble, an amoral sociopath, and also someone born before the Empire fell, was generally not happy with the idea of having this otherworldly power dictating things more than it already did, and so recruited the Hedgehogs to help him. How? Well, now that's the question!

After much deliberating, discussing and planning, the party settled on a rather shaky, but at least concrete plan - they were going to venture out into the old city ruins back to the remains of the temple of Ishtar, the very first dungeon they visited in the campaign. They knew that the Slime Priests in there were aligned with Chaos, and therefore were going to want to help disrupt whatever big power move the forces of Law were doing for the city. Plus, they reasoned, these guys had clearly been keeping an eye on the Undying City for months now, so they likely had a better idea of what those plans even were. 

After a trip out into the ruins, a fight with some slime-covered zombies and having to burn an entire corridor's worth of yellow mold, the party finally found some Slime Priests and offered them to work together. The priests wanted to recruit the two sorcerers in the party to join their lord - The Chaos Lord knowing simply as The Decomposition, but they declined. Instead a plan was hatched where the Slime Priests will gather whatever allies and armies they had and assault the ruins-side gatehouse of the Eternal Bridge, the party will then attack the inner gatehouse and allow the Slime Priests and their allies access into the city to help stop the ritual, or at least disrupt it for long enough for a better plan to be hatched.

They also learned what the ritual was going to do - as the procession of the new year celebration made its round around the city, the final gesture of a grand ritual that had been years in the making would take place, and the entire population of the city would be turned into empty undead husks. Perfect servants for the Pale Stillness - obedient, not worried by hunger or pain or thoughts. They also learned that the actual ruler of the city were not the high priests, but a high ranking officer within the armies of the Pale Stillness of Justice - a being not from this reality which is the actual individual performing this complicated magical ritual.

The shaky alliance secured, the party headed back, discussing among themselves just how wrong it felt to stop such a big tragedy by inviting a different tragedy into the city.

Observations

So, right off the bat - this is kind of a big thing to drop on the players, for sure. I did not, in fact, want to dissuade them from visiting the dungeon. If anything, I had spent about an hour last night just writing out more things about it.

And further more - this did not come out of nowhere. In fact even before the campaign had its first session, my plan had always been that eventually the rulers of the Undying City were going to try and pull off this big move to secure the city permanently for the side of Law. There had been plenty of hints thrown throughout the campaign and the players knew that something was going on behind the walls of the Temple District, but they also never dedicated the time to go investigate it further. So now they are left with a situation that is, quite frankly, probably way out of their scale to deal with. 

I also enjoy that, rather accidentally, this session is when so many older threads ended up resurfacing again. The river shrine had been under construction since before the party headed south, the barbarian that left to go look for the other missing pieces of the magical sword has returned, and with the looming threat of the ritual the party decided that they needed allies badly, so badly enough that they went back to the people who nearly slaughtered them months ago (luckily for them, the priests did not really recognize the characters). 

As a referee this whole situation is exciting, and the players are all clearly invested in it too. However it does present a challenge on how to properly map out just what is actually going on, so as to give the players as much of a neutral overview of the situation as I can give, and then let their actions throughout the game actually guide the outcome. Something for me to put on my designer hat on and write out in as much detail as I feel I will need. 

BSSS - Session 9

Summary

The characters return to free the Sea Nymph and there is a sudden and shocking death of a party member as they do it. 

Characters

• Esho - 4th Level Nercomancer Sorcerer [Now Dead]
• Shimsusa the Archer - 1st Level Fighter
• Maru the Witch - 3rd Level Diabolist Sorcerer
• Syphon Gandu - 2nd Level Diabolist Sorcerer
• Rajini - 2nd Level Sorceress 
• Athra - 4th Level Fighter
• Gal-Naha the Giant Gecko - 3rd Level Giant Lizard
• Arrim- 1st Level Fighter

Session Recap

During the downtime portion of the session, the group gets a properly suitable vessel (an ornately decorated and blessed clay urn) in which to house the Sea Nymph, and also get called to meet with Commander Utu, the bull-headed giant of a man, who has heard of some of their exploits and wants to get the details out of them directly. As the son of a divine being himself, Utu offers some answers to the party's question regarding the Sea Nymph, though he can't really give much specific advice not being someone who has met her himself.

They are also joined by Arrim, a new member of the Hedgehogs of Mercy who's heard of their fame and exploits and wants to join in. Just as well, as Esho finally decides it is time to hold his lecture of "Why Necromancy is Totally Fine, You Guys" in front of the gathered party, mercenaries, hirelings and assorted hangers on. (He had been planning this thing for months, but keeps getting distracted by something else.)

With preparations out of the way, the party finally decided on a course of action. They will head back into the jungle (Aho the guide slightly reluctantly leading them again, this time with an even bigger pay promised) and actively look for river pirates to capture and sacrifice to in order to free the nymph. Luckily for them the jungle outside of Bastion is apparently just crawling with pirates as they run into some of them clearly set up in waiting to ambush a ship. 

There is much debate between the characters, various strategies are formed as to how to approach these guys and finally Athra and Arrim simply decide to act as decoys, walking up out of the jungle and into the river bank and loudly proclaiming their intent to to go back into town and warn the Bull Guards that they've found some pirates. The pirates in turn kindly responded with a hail of arrows, luckily none of which managed to get through the fighters' armor. A bloody and rather messy fights ensued, with spells being cast, pirates being dropped left and right (while Athra keeps shouting at people to not kill these guys as they need prisoners), some of the pirates and the party's skirmishers get into a protracted shoot out, the works.

Finally, after Esho manages to put down some of the pirates to sleep with his magic, the party mops up whoever else is left and gets their new found prisoners (along with their boats for good measure) and heads back to town. They deliver several to the Guards as a gesture of their commitment to aid the city, and after a night of rest head out with the others towards the ruins. 

Along the way, Maru the Witch, still salty and unhappy with the party's plan on freeing the nymph, decides he's going to call for some otherworldly aid and petition a demon to get some answers. He and the other sorcerers go a bit to the side from the rest of the party (not wanting to spook any of the mercenaries, or the new guy for that matter) and perform the ritual, offering the soul of one of the pirates as payment. The being summoned offers some useful, if rather obvious information...and then as negotiations break down Maru simply dismisses it. 

Back into the ruined dungeon they go, and the party is once again standing in front of the Daughter of the Sea (although Maru, as a mark of protest, stays just outside the room). Esho has the honor of drowning one of the pirates into the waters of the fountain, with the Sea Nymph now freed from her confines. She offers all the people who freed her a blessing - the ability to breathe under water. All who agree to the blessing (everyone except Maru agrees) get a kiss from the Daughter of the Sea, which fills their lungs with liquid, slowly drowning them...until it no longer does. And they realize they can now breathe despite the water in their chests.  Thankful the sea nymph went into the prepared urn, which Esho and his companion and mercenary then lug out of the room, as the rest of the party start to loot all the coins and the golden statue that adorn the fountain (the real reason why they wanted to get the Sea Nymph out of there in the first place). 

However, being distracted by carrying the urn, Esho does not spot the fleeting glimmer of a magically cloaked figure that approaches him from the back. And before he knew what happened, he ended up with a dagger stuck into his back, piercing his heart and killing him on the spot. In his dying breath he and his followers see a pale and thin woman pull the blade out of him, before vanishing into the air. 

There is much commotion, people quickly finished gathering the rest of the loot and just hauled everything and everyone (including the urn and Esho's corpse) out of the dungeon, waiting to see if they will be followed. 

As the party finally decide to head back the remaining sorcerers do spot a glowing energy out in the distance tracking the party, but as soon as they stop to pay attention to it, it darts back behind a ruined building. 

On the bank of the Serpent of Smoke the group release the Daughter of the Sea into the waters (she told them she can find her way back to her Mother from there) and as a final gesture ask if she will take Esho's body with her. She agrees, and gently picks up the necromancer's corpse, bringing it beneath the waters and taking it off to dwell in the underwater realm of the Sea Queen. 

Observations

Ho boy! This session. The big fight with the pirates actually felt way WAY too long. And that was strange - it lasted 4 rounds in-game and probably just about 30-40 minutes out of game, yet it felt like it dragged on forever. It was also not big enough to try and dust off any skirmish rules for it. I think the main reason was that the planning beforehand just took far too long without anything actually being done. I was hoping on keeping the session short, but even right before the fight finished...I had realized that if I do that literally this one fight (and the lead up to it) would have been the entire session, and that just sucked. 

The players had previously asked me if the can somehow just go look for pirates. The way I ended up ruling it is that with Aho the Guide on hand and actively looking for pirates, as they do their overland exploration any encounter they run into (if they run into one) will be specifically with pirates. This way they still didn't know just how long this might take, yet it allowed them to direct their efforts. I am happy with this as away of solving the situation. 

Then there was the Daughter of the Sea. I had this written out in the dungeon as I was keying it several weeks ago, but I do love it when characters are able to get blessings or other abilities throughout the course of the game as a result of play rather than simply leveling up. And being able to breathe underwater (for just 1 hour, but still) felt like a very appropriate blessing that the Sea Nymph would give. 

Esho's death was also rather sudden, both to me and to the players. I had rolled a random encounter, and this woman (who my players have now already starter speculating about!) was the one to show up. I had already figured out what her general approach is if she encounters the party, and Esho did have a chance to spot her (and he failed that roll) because Sorcerers in my game all have the ability to spot magic, and Shroud (the spell from Wonder and Wickedness the woman was using) specifically states that incorporeal things or people with second sight can see them. 

So, she's invisible and hasn't been spotted, and she stabbed him in the back with her dagger. Daggers in my house rules do 1d6-1 damage ( so worse than all other weapons), but have the ability to backstab for 2d6 if the target is unaware and undefended. Well...Esho was both. And he got one-shot by it. Fittingly, the player who plays Esho had in fact planned on pulling off this exact same strategy as the campaign was starting hah! 

The player took it in good spirit, and in fact actually got even more hyped up about the game, plus the final scene with handing over the body to the sea nymph felt genuinely heartfelt and touching. This is the kind of stuff I like gaming for, and this is what I feel the OSR does so well. None of the drama or emotions in this character death came from some prescriptive scenario or expectation. People, myself included, cared because Esho had been created in Session 1 of the game and had been a consistent presence in the party since then. It is the kind of attachment and meaning one gets only through actually spending the time with the game and the character. 

Rest in Peace Esho, you weird death-obsessed man. There will be plenty of corpses on the bottom of the sea for you to bother in your afterlife! 

BSSS - Session 8

 A bit late, but here's a session report on last week's Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel!

Summary

The party follows up on the last lead they have, have run-ins with ghouls and a rather demanding and haughty Sea Nymph. They also make friends with a water elemental.

Characters

• Esho - 4th Level Nercomancer Sorcerer 
• Shimsusa the Archer - 1st Level Fighter
• Maru the Witch - 3rd Level Diabolist Sorcerer
• Syphon Gandu - 2nd Level Diabolist Sorcerer
• Rajini - 2nd Level Sorceress 
• Athra - 4th Level Fighter
• Gal-Naha the Giant Gecko - 3rd Level Giant Lizard
• Tamri Ushar - 1st Level Fighter

Session Recap

The party, having run into a bit of a wall on their last expedition decided to follow up on another lead they had while they were down south - a treasure map they had found when exploring another dungeon previously was pointing to the ruins of a nearby small town. 

Packing up their camping gear they left the Bastion and travelled east, eventually running into an old (but still surprisingly sturdy) bridge that lead them into the town ruins. With the help of the actual treasure map they didn't really need to waste time searching through the ruins. The entrance was covered under some fallen stones, but with a bit of work they managed to get it cleared off head down and away from the constant rainstorms that had been going on for the past two days. 

Once inside the vanguard of the group ran into an oddly behaving puddle, which then turned out to be a small water elemental! A very very fortunate reaction table roll and one of the players using one of their extra language slots to declare they can speak the language of Water Elementals lead to them learning that the water elemental was part of a larger group of elementals which were somehow locked away behind one of the doors in the room. 

The door, upon examination, did have a magical field surrounding it, centered on a clearly magical lock pad that was put on it. The group promised the elemental they'll try and figure out how to get it back to it's people, then proceeded with exploring. After having to electrocute some very aggressive water leeches, the group heard calls for help behind a door rather suspiciously jammed shut with multiple metal spikes. After asking who the person inside was they learned that she is a daughter of the Sea Goddess.

Unfortunately all the yelling through the door attracted attention. With the aid of a helm of telepathy the party wasn't caught by surprise and managed to form up by the next door way as three gaunt, dog-headed figures rushed onto them. The first one taking a swing at the party's fighter and immediately paralyzing him and bringing him to the ground. Luckily for him the rest of the party managed to dispatch these monsters in very short notice, and after letting him recover they proceeded with a touch more caution.

Searching through some corpses and another ghoul attack later the party was 500 silver coins richer and somehow managed to not have a single one of them get killed by a ghoul! With that they returned to the trapped sea nymph and went inside to talk to her. She explained that she had been trapped for quite a while and wanted their help in being released from the fountain that housed her (a fountain, the party quickly noted, containing quite a lot of coins and a solid looking golden statue of the nymph's mother the Sea Queen). 

The party was all for that...until they learned the plan involved having to drown a human in her waters to release the spell, and also needing to obtain a blessed vessel of some kind so that the sea nymph can be carried safely (and doesn't just end up drowning them) to the sea. They said they didn't have anyone to sacrifice, nor any vessels appropriate for the task but promised they will be back as soon as they can!

The nymph was not sold on the whole thing though - she was an ancient and powerful being, essentially a minor divinity in her own right, and apparently others had been there before and had refused to help her, so she tried to use her magical charming ability on one of the sorcerers, but it didn't quite work. At this point one of the diabolists in the party cast Dominate on her...which was quite the mistake, as it now gave the sea nymph a direct mental link to his mind, charming him instantly and making him try and drown one of his hirelings. The rest of the party subdued him, told her to please stop doing that and that they'll help her later and all left the room, with the sorcerer now being VERY pissed off at her and trying to shout at her, but mostly being stopped by the others.

As the session was getting on in time, the party decided to simply try a few loose ends on that side of the dungeon before they headed back., They explored some of the ghoul lair and ran into a room filled with half-eaten and rotting corpses, the stench being so horrendous it made it impossible to even go inside. The party's necromancer got a glint in his eyes and gleefully reanimated a few of the less chewed-on corpses, making them search the room for them (finding some ghoul treasure) and then using them to explore some of the other rooms before, just in case the spell backfired, making them go back to the room and closing the door behind themselves. Well except for one of the zombies which managed to fall in a hidden hole in some water. 

The last thing to do was to open up a locked door that they had found a key for earlier, and lo and behold it worked! Behind the door they found a pair of well fed and actually pretty chill mountain lions, chained to the walls and clearly set as guards (the fact also confirmed by the party's fighter being able to use Beastspeech to talk to them). The group was not entirely sure what to do with these things, so they simply put them to sleep and then killed them, dragging their corpses back with them and presenting them to the company's cook for skinning and then cooking the meat.

Observations

So, this was quite the interesting session for me, as the dungeon is of my own design. I simply got a map off of Watabou (a truly wonderful resource) and then writing up the key for it. I do hope the party comes back to it again, as they really only have explored about a quarter or even a fifth of the actual dungeon! But we shall see where their whims take them.

The thing with the water elemental was quite fun, and one of the reasons why I generally try and use Reaction Rolls whenever I can, short of very very clearly aggressive or friendly encounters. It makes for such fun situations like this of talking to a blob of water with the intelligence of a smart cat, hah. 

In the days following the session the players have talked at length about the encounter with the Sea Nymph (who's name is the sound of crashing waves upon the rocks, which I am also proud of) and the player of the sorcerer that got mind controlled having a personal vendetta against her now, and declaring that his character will try and actively convince the others during Downtime to not free her but instead try and destroy her in some way, as he felt personally insulted that a being of such power would also act so dismissively towards people who are trying to help it. 

This kind of engagement with the game you can't really force or cajole out of players. This stuff simply comes from people actually caring about what is going on in the game and having a very genuine reaction (another example is the vendetta one of the players has against the one hireling which said she's quitting in the middle of the expedition, sessions back). It makes me happy to see it happen, and it makes me curious what the party will ultimatley decide to do with the Sea Nymph. 

Using Errant Warbands in OD&D

 I've been wanting to have a way to streamline some of the combat in my OD&D campaign, namely reduce the number of rolls involved in the close quarters combat phase, where you have say 2 PCs and 3 mercenaries facing off against a group of 6 enemies and then just a whole bunch of dice rolls need to be made. 

My first thought was to try and adapt the concept of Warbands from Ava Islam's Errant. What you see below is where I got that to. I have run one playtest of this system during my game, which you can read a bit more about in this session report. 

The long and short of it is that I am not super happy with how this worked and it brought on a lot of questions regarding practicalities of it's use. 

However, just because something failed to meet it's goals, doesn't mean I shouldn't just share it anyway, so here we go. Maybe some of you can make better use of this. Keep in mind that this is written specifically for my own campaign's house rules, but I am sure you can easily just adapt elements to your own OD&D game without too many issues.

Warbands Rules

Mercs do not fight individually in combat, but instead augment the combat prowess of their leader (usually a PC).

Warbands come in Small, Medium and Large sizes, depending on the number of people in them, not counting the leader.

Small Warbands are from 1 to 5 people.

Medium Warbands are from 6 to 10 people.

Large Warbands are from 11 to 20 people.

Warbands have HP based on how many people are in it (again, not counting the leader)..A warband’s HP is based on the hit dice of its members, with every 1 HD member adding 2 HP, 2-3 HD adding 3 HP and 4+HD adding 4 HP to the warband total. For ease of keeping track of casualties, warbands are always composed of members with the same Hit Dice, maybe having 1 singular member who acts as leader (in which case they are not counted and instead have their own individual HP pool).

Damage is always dealt first to the Warband before it is dealt to the Leader. As a Warband loses HP it might fall from one category to another.

Attacks by individuals against a Warband are impaired, unless that individual has a means of hitting everyone in an area (a Fighter or Monster’s sweeping attack, a Mage’s AOE spell, etc). From there each step in size difference (individual, small warband, medium warband, large warband) incurs either an impairment (when a smaller group attacks a bigger one) or an enhancement (when a bigger group attacks a smaller one).

1 Level of Enhancement/Impairment gives +/-2 to attack rolls and +/-1 to damage rolls.

2 Levels of Enhancement/Impairment give +/-4 to attack rolls and +/-2 to damage rolls.

3 Levels of Enhancement/Impairment give +/-8 to attack rolls and +/-3 to damage rolls.

Here's how that looks, laid out in a table.

Additional Notes

Fighters that have a sweep attack add the bonuses/penalties to each attack roll they make. When using a sweep attack against a warband Fighters ignore the impairment from attacking a larger group, if they can hit all members of it.

A Sorcerer casting Maleficence on a Warband still does 2d6 hits to it!

For every 2 (or 3 or 4 depending on armor) HP that the warband loses, a mercenary is killed.

A warband’s AC is based on the AC of the Leader.

[I would have included some example combats here, but blogger is insisting on completely fucking up their formatting so I just gave up after the third try.]

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).