First off, just a heads up, there’s not going to be a campaign diary next week (editor’s note- by “next week” I really mean “this week” since this was posted late. Whoops). I was very busy the last couple of weeks and wasn’t able to prep as much as I wanted and so the session has been pushed back, either one or two weeks depending on the players’ availability. If I think of something there might still be a blog post next week, but it’s probable that there won’t be. Anyway, on with the show.
You know the Ankheg the party found and avoided last session? Well, the behind the screen reason for that is that I just… forgot to print out the Ankheg stat block. I was super excited to run it, the players were super excited to fight it, and then I was looking through my stuff for the stat block and it just wasn’t there. The players were very gracious in having their characters decide to look through the rest of the area first.
One thing that I think has been missing from past games I’ve run that happened in this session is inter-party debate. I don’t quite understand why this was missing before or why it’s happening now, but twice now the players have spent quite a bit of time arguing over what to do about a particular situation. I love it! Maybe it’s happening because they have things in front of them that aren’t problems now, but represent potential problems in the future? And so there isn’t as much pressure to come to an immediate decision, and no one feels the need to act immediately before everyone has had their say? I’ll get back to you when (if) I figure it out.
An interesting thing about Allora being the only party member who can read Caerwyn’s journal is that it’s made Allora’s point of view about what’s in the journal the default point of view. I don’t know if it’s the player or the character doing this, but Allora is basically taking Caerwyn’s words at face value, and the thing is- she shouldn’t. Caerwyn has basically been driven mad by grief at this point, and he is not a reliable narrator or journaler. Another thing about the journal that the players have assumed is that the journal – which is written in the present tense – is entirely about past events, which is not true. Most of it describes past events, but the third entry describes both past events and future plans. The human hovel isn’t something Caerwyn has already destroyed, it’s Hommlet, and Caerwyn was planning on destroying it. Depending on what the heroes decide to do once they capture him, he still might.
Going into the next session, there’s a good chance the players will finish out this adventure, but that depends on them. If they just grab Caerwyn’s unconscious body, kill the last ogre, and head back to Hommlet it could be done real quick, but that leaves 7 vine-zombie-humans and 1 vine-zombie-ankheg in the dungeon, plus a tied up Wode Elf in the moathouse. If the characters remember – I may or may not remind them – they might go handle some or all of those loose ends. They might also remember, and still just head back to Hommlet with Caerwyn. Depending on what combination of Caerwyn and his underlings survive, things could go very poorly indeed for Hommlet once the heroes depart. I suppose we’ll see how it goes.
The heroes ventured into the lower level of the moathouse and began discovering some of Caerwyn’s experiments and notes. They found a giant ant-like monster in a room and avoided it (for now), as well as 7 more vine-ridden human thralls that they left in the cells (for now). They paid off some orcs that Caerwyn had hired as guards, and confronted Caerwyn, ending the session in the middle of combat against him.
The Long Story:
The heroes followed their Wode Elf captive’s directions and descended into the dungeon of the Moathouse. They found a giant ant-like monster in a room and avoided it (for now), then found a room where someone had basically dissected a human and had woven vines and roots throughout their muscles and joints across their entire body. Next door they found a small study with a bunch of research notes as well as Caerwyn’s journal, which had the following passages. It should be noted that in a Wode (an elf-haunted forest) time works quite non-linearly, and the way elf memory works in general is (possibly?) more like reliving than remembering an event, so the journal of a Wode Elf like Caerwyn tends to have a very tenuous relationship with linear time and with grammatical tenses. You’ll see what I mean.
“The patchwork men take Lynwen. They take my entire family. I cannot stop reliving it. I cannot stop the patchwork men. I cannot stop Ajax. They are all beyond my reach.”
“I wander. I wander through the woods until the woods turn to swamp. I find a structure. It is human. It stinks with the evil all men stink with.”
“The swamp turns to grassland. I see a human hovel. I smell its stench. I feel the hate seeping out of it. Hate for my people and for me. Love for Ajax and for his patchwork men. I end it. I let the forest swallow the hovel. The hovel and the humans and my family never return.”
Allora, the Wode Elf Shadow of the party, is the only one who can read the journal, and she relays the contents to the party. She concludes that the vine infested creatures they’ve seen so far might be related to the War Dogs, but Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope thinks that they’re probably Caerwyn’s creations.
They move on and find a row of cells holding 7 more humans infested with vines. They don’t react to anything the party does, and the party starts thinking about what they should do about them. Allora and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope both think they should kill them before they have a chance to hurt anyone, but Paarthanoxx is strongly against that. He is first off worried that these aren’t just mindless husks and that they could be cured somehow, and even if they’re not, he is opposed to just putting them down in this dungeon and thinks something more dignified should be done with them. His ideal solution, I think, would be to stop Caerwyn, see what happens to them after he’s defeated, and then either rescue them if they become living humans again or take their corpses back to town and give them proper burials. Allora and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope, on the other hand, think that these guys are basically just plant zombies and they are worried about them being released and attacking the party from behind later. They go back and forth until Scarn gets bored of the debate and decides to open one of the cells to see what this creature even does.
And it attacks them. Scarn and Paarthanoxx manage to get it pushed back into the cell and trapped again, and the party decides to just leave them in the cells until later. Allora and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope still don’t like this, but Paarthanoxx is a lot more passionate on the subject so they go along with him for now. Also I’m pretty sure they want to get to say “I told you so” when they later get ambushed from behind.
Moving on, they find a secret passage that leads down to a T, and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope notices that there’s also a hidden alcove here with a winch in it. This winch also sparks some debate. No one wants to turn it, but they’re all worried about what it might do. Some of them want to destroy it entirely but Paarthanoxx points out that might trigger whatever it does without any way of undoing it, and some of them think about just making it unusable by removing the handles but there’s no obvious way to do that without removing the handles permanently. Ultimately, Allora uses a rope to tie the winch down so that anyone who wants to use it will have to spend a long time untying it.
They move on and come to a large, empty room with a single door on the other side. Something about this immediately makes them suspicious. Paarthanoxx searches the room for traps while everyone else ponders what sinister things lie in wait for them in this room. Possibly monsters. Perhaps poison gas. Maybe spikes. Paarthanoxx finds nothing. Allora goes to open the door, feels a mechanism trigger as she turns the handle, and finds a wall behind the door. The whole party then hears a brief faint scraping or squealing sound from back where they came from.
They return and find that a metal grate has partially swung down from the ceiling, and the winch has shifted slightly. Had they not tied up the winch, the grate would have swung down all the way, trapping the party until they could winch it back up. This, they decide, would be unacceptable, and Paarthanoxx busts out his expert carpentry skills to hammer nails into the winch until it cannot be turned.
The party leaves the alcove and finds four orcs standing there and watching them, having been drawn by the sound of 5 minutes of constant hammering. Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope quickly starts giving them a made-up excuse for why they’re down there and just as quickly fails to come up with anything halfway believable and gives up. He admits that they’re down there looking for Caerwyn, and the orcs tell him that Caerwyn has hired them to stand guard. Luckily for the party, the orcs do not hold Caerwyn in terribly high esteem, and the party offers to buy them out. For twice what the Caerwyn is paying them, the orcs agree to help them take him down. One of the party members does note that if the orcs were this quick to betray Caerwyn, they might be quick to betray the party if Caerwyn offers them even more gold. There’s some talking about the orcs possibly just leaving, but eventually the arrangement is made that once Caerwyn is beaten, the orcs and the party will split anything of value that Caerwyn has as an incentive for everyone to stay honest. They shake on it, and the orcs lead them to Caerwyn’s ritual room.
They find Caerwyn in the middle of the reanimation of a vine-ridden human and combat quickly begins. Caerwyn’s ritual room has had the ceiling torn off, exposing a thick covering of plant life that has overgrown about a third of the room. When the fighting begins, two ogres, almost entirely taken over by vines, reveal themselves from the overgrowth. The orcs, led by Tulxan Alderberry, take on one ogre, while the rest of the party takes on Caerwyn and the second ogre. The party thinks there’s a chance that if Caerwyn is incapacitated, the ogres might die as well, so they focus heavily on him. He is quite quickly close to being killed or knocked unconscious, so he commands the ogre to grab him and put him on top of the roots and vines covering the ritual room so he could make his escape. Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope wasn’t a fan of this, but he doesn’t have any abilities that can restrain Caerwyn, so instead he knocked him a frankly ridiculous distance away and dealt quite a lot of damage to him. The session ended with Allora and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope both teleporting up to follow Caerwyn while Paarthanoxx and Scarn continued to fight the ogre.
If you’re playing in my game, don’t read this. If you do, I’ll send you to Finland.
Last week’s session was the first session that really utilized the adventure module I’m using, The Village of Hommlet. If you don’t already know, The Village of Hommlet is a famous adventure written by Gary Gygax for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. We’re not playing Draw Steel!, not AD&D, so there’s a fair bit I’ve had to change about the adventure.
First, there are a whole bunch of encounters in TVoH that really wouldn’t challenge the party. In D&D that would be fine because D&D is built around attrition AND offers the party experience points in small amount for even small encounters (in AD&D terms I believe you got XP based on the amount of gold you find, not from killing monsters, but the point still stands).
In Draw Steel! however, things work a bit differently: •Your character’s coolest abilities use your class’s Heroic Resource, which you gain throughout an encounter. There’s no attrition for your character’s abilities, only their health. •When you beat an encounter your character gets 1 or 2 victories. When you start an encounter, you receive your Heroic Resource equal to the number of Victories you have, and when you take a rest, your Victories become XP. BUT, since each Victory is quite significant, you don’t get any victories for trivial encounter.
Because of those two points, I think trivial encounters would feel pretty bad for the players. The fight wouldn’t be terribly exciting because everyone knows the party is going to win, the party isn’t getting anything from the fight, and they’re just losing stamina. It’s a lose-lose-lose scenario.
So, I took out most of the encounters I thought would be trivial once made with Draw Steel!’s monsters. Some frogs at the Moathouse entrance were taken out entirely, a giant spider in a tower was found already killed by the villain of the adventure (who I also completely changed), some brigands were replaced with Wode Elves, and a big snake, a lizard, and a giant tick were all removed.
Also, the evil vines I showed off in the last Players Keep Out! post didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped. They did a little bit, but with how Draw Steel! potencies (the equivalent of a D&D saving throw but without the randomness) work, I’d have to roll very well to really affect most of the party members (Paarthanoxx got affected because his Might is as low as it could possibly be). Next time I make something like this, I’ll probably have them only rely on the roll and not on any of the party’s stats unless the effect is nastier or harder to end.
The heroes had their first combat against an ogre and some evil vines, got their first look (sorta) at the villain of the adventure, did some exploration of the moathouse, and then killed some elves and interrogated the one elf they didn’t kill. They learned that the villain is a Wode Elf Green Elementalist named Caerwyn, and that he’s downstairs doing gods know what.
The Long Story
The session began as the first session ended: with an ogre charging the party. This ogre was noticeably covered in vines and vegetation, and it seemed like some of the vines were even growing into the ogre. The combat started out with the party figuring out how to keep Michael Thornberry, who was at the front of the group and is just a normal dude, from getting turned into paste by the ogre. Paarthanoxx, the Dragon Knight Null, went first, got up to the ogre, and then used an ability that taunted the ogre, which makes it less effective at targeting anyone but Paarthanoxx. Immediately after Paarthanoxx’s turn however, he was yanked quite viciously into the muck by a rather sinister vine. Over the course of the battle, Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope killed the vine suffocating Paarthanoxx, Allora did a really cool combo where she teleported behind the ogre in reaction to it attacking her, the immediately took her turn in a sort of “Nothing personnel kid” sort of way, Michael Thornberry ran away as fast as he could, and Scarn landed the final blow. In doing so he split the ogre in twain, revealing that the ogre’s body was completely taken over by vines, which began twisting together into a crude humanoid form. From all directions, like it was coming from the swamp itself, the party heard a voice say, “You do not belong here. You must leave.” before the form collapsed on itself.
At this point, Michael Thornberry has had quite enough of the swamp and very much wants to go home. There’s some debate amongst the party about what to do. Some of them think they should let him go, some think that if they just let him leave he’ll die in the swamp, and Scarn at one point floats the idea that they should just make him continue to the moathouse with them. Ultimately, they end up escorting him out the the swamp to the road because that won’t take too long and will at least ensure Michael doesn’t get drowned by an evil vine. They also take a short break to rest up and use some recoveries.
Continuing on, Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope now leads the party through the swamp and manages to find the moathouse. It’s a two story stone building, but the top story is almost completely destroyed. They search the moathouse’s tower, which is still intact, and find a giant spider which has been skewered by vines and roots erupting from the walls of the tower. From the top of the tower, they can see that there’s been a lot of foot traffic through the courtyard to a set of doors. They go through these doors to a large room that has been thoroughly ransacked, and find that there are two hallways branching off either side of this room, and a door on the opposite side. They choose to check out the door at the far end, but before they go through, they pause at the door and listen.
There are indeed voices on the other side, speaking Ylliric, the Wode Elf language. They send Allora, the party’s resident Wode Elf, to go talk to whoever is on the other side of the door. She peeks a head in, makes some small talk, asks some questions, and is thoroughly convinced that they’re just travelers who have taken shelter here for the night. Allora’s companions are not as convinced, and they barge in to ask some more questions. The Wode Elves are understandably not very interested in being interrogated by a bunch of strangers, and the party takes their caginess as a sign that the elves are up to no good. Communication quickly breaks down and now it’s their second fight of the adventure.
Once the fight breaks out it becomes clear that one of the elves is not actually an elf, but a human that is completely overtaken by vines, much like the ogre from before. The fight goes pretty well for the party, except for Paarthanoxx, who kinda got stuck in between three of the elves for most of the fight and got pummeled quite a bit. Eventually all but one of the enemies are dead, and the party just knocks the last one out to interrogate him. Now that he’s alone and bound, he’s a lot more communicative. The party learns from him that the group they just fought was here helping out a Green Elementalist named Caerwyn, and the party puts two and two together that the figure that told them to leave in the swamp was Caerwyn, or at least a message from him. Caerwyn, according to the party’s prisoner, is downstairs performing strange rituals and experiments.
If you’re playing in my game, don’t read this. If you do, I’ll throw you into the sun.
We’re only playing once every two weeks because people are busy, so I figure I might as well post a retrospective on the previous session that goes into some of the behind-the-screen sort of stuff. So that’s what this is going to be! Have fun.
So first, let’s talk about a couple dumb mistakes I made. This is my first time running a sandbox style game, and I wanted the players to start out with a bunch of hooks to different adventures to prevent a situation where they have their first hook and that becomes the first thing they do because… what else are they going to do? So every character started with a hook to a different adventure, but I screwed up communicating that to everyone, so there were a few players who started out thinking that each hook was to the same adventure and that was going to be how everyone came together as a party. That would have been a good idea, but I had a different idea that would get us straight into player-led sandboxy goodness. Only… I messed that up too. When I was writing the hooks, I had this idea in my mind that each character would have some idea that the associated adventure would be too much for their character alone, so they would naturally be interested in getting together with other likeminded heroes. But I ALSO failed to make that clear in the hooks and didn’t tell the players directly. What a fool I am.
But in spite of all that, it still went pretty good! Honestly, the awkwardness that all caused did a pretty good job of simulating the awkwardness of 5 very nonhuman people showing up in a very human town that was at best quite chilly towards them. There was some really good roleplay going on and I was hugely impressed with how quickly my players had an idea of who their character was and actually put it into the world.
Now, onto some specifics. Michael Thornberry might die next session, or maybe the one after that. He’s just a guy and he’s wholly unprepared to find anything other than muck in the swamp. He’s probably going to want to leave very early into Friday’s session, but there’s a chance that he gets killed if he tries to leave on his own. If the party keeps him alive throughout the adventure, there’s a very good chance he wants to curl up in his tavern a cry. I don’t think he’s going to stick around with the party long term.
We had our first fight of the campaign after the session! It didn’t actually happen, but I ran out of prepped material while we still had time so we went back to the War Dogs that the party passed as a little white room scenario. Two characters very nearly died! It was basically a standard encounter according to the monster rules as they currently are, but my players are new to this game and I think they’re just used to DnD combat where you basically have to just wait until after an encounter is done to meaningfully heal. In Draw Steel!, you can use a maneuver (basically a bonus action in DnD terms) to heal 1/3 of your stamina, and you can do that quite a few times before needing to take a rest. I think even the elementalist in the party has 8 of those he can use, so it’s a pretty large amount of health. The tactician really saved the party in that combat because when the PCs damage the enemy he has marked, they can use one of their heals without using a maneuver, so once things started looking dicey for them they had an easy way to stay alive.
Lastly (and this has more to do with next session than the previous one), I made my first Draw Steel! homebrew! It’s a very simple environmental hazard (and honestly very similar to one that’s already in the monster packet they sent out) but it’s mine! It’s a hidden evil vine that’s going to try to drown the PCs in the swamp! How fun!
I’m pretty happy with how visually similar this is to the monster stat blocks that MCDM has released for Draw Steel! while only using google sheets. I’m not sure about whether EV 3 is accurate (one Level 1 hero is roughly EV 6) but we’re going to find out! My hope is that the vines will take up enough of the heroes’ action economy that the ogre becomes a big enough threat for them. Otherwise it’ll get stomped pretty badly, I think.
Blog Steel! 