Atoll of the Shark God: Session Seven

In the hold of the ship, Aedric dreamed of cursed items. The talking bone-sword, the clay tablet, the green amulet, the coral ring, and the shark-tooth pendant danced around him, laughing. Then he awoke to the noise of something snuffling through his pack. It was the nightmarish fish monster! Slightly smaller than before, but still just as horrible. Vraifigi was already awake, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. She leapt onto its scaly back and carved chunks out of it with her shiny dagger. Mateo cast Light so the rest of the party could actually see. Simon stumbled out of his hammock and threw his own dagger directly in the beast's eye. It sunk deep into the socket, only to rocket back at him as the old eye fell onto the floor and a new one popped out to replace it. Then Francesco chopped it in half with his sword.

Atoll of the Shark God: Session Two

Josian awoke to the deafening sound of a trumpet. When she ran up to the deck, assuming the worst, she found that it was just the sailors playing with the Shofar Ram. They were hazing each other, seeing who could last the longest in the cone of its sonic attack. The rest of the party was unable to get the sailors to hoist them back up to the ship for the night, so they sent Mr. Feathers to find Josian. 

Back on the ship, Aedric tried on the blue shark-tooth necklace. He was immediately overcome with hunger, but also a sense that feasting on fish would make him stronger. He also found himself unable to take it off. Aedric called upon the powers of the Grain Goddess to fill his belly so that he might discard the cursed item. The party briefly entertained the idea of cursing Portygul with the necklace, but realized a very hungry dragon was probably a bad idea.

Atoll of the Shark God: Session One

The Satyrdance still had a month's left of contracting for the crew, and Aedric had received word of a new treasure site from the church of the Grain Goddess. So they sailed south to the titular atoll. With the better weather, they were able to fully survey the islands with Josian's spyglass. They could see a small orange dragon lounging on the beach next to a longship and decided to make landfall further south. The southernmost island proved to be full of nothing but seals. The Satyrdance continued clockwise around the atoll until they spotted a large ram atop a hill.

Low Tide on the Spit: Session Three

The party returned to find the Iron Cup fort in lockdown mode. Too many people had gone missing and they weren't letting anyone in or out without express permission from Tovosia. So the group decided to spend the night on the Satyrdance, anchored at the shore. 

They set sail at first light for the southern tip of the southern-most island. With Josian by their side, they hoped to incapacitate the pirate crew by spamming Sleep. However, as they sailed down the eastern shores, they were once again distracted by an interesting sight. A massive rock formation with steam billowing out of the base where the stone met the sea. The steam seemed to be coming out of shore-level caves. Once the party was sure the caves wouldn't flood and drown them and that the steam wouldn't boil them alive, they entered one.

Low Tide on the Spit: Session Two

The party woke up the next morning with the intent of finding the pirate ship Man's Fate. As they began to circumnavigate the southernmost island, Josian spotted a large shape in the fog. It was so far away that not even the spyglass could resolve its features. Was it a ship, an island, or a massive sea monster? Nobody knew. The group held a vote and unanimously agreed to investigate. As they sailed closer, a tall craggy island stretched out of the fog, rocky and dotted with trees. A little above the shoreline, a dolmen was nestled into the cliff side.

Low Tide on the Spit: Session One

The survivors of the Lost Vineyard were sailing towards The Spit, an archipelago of sub-polar islands currently experiencing a record-breaking low tide. Vraifigi had christened their ship the Satyrdance. Josian stood at the prow, peering into the fog with her newly purchased spyglass. Simon slept in the hold, waiting for an important message to come to him in his dreams. Amalia watched her hawk, Mister Feathers, fly alongside the ship, while she entertained her hounds, Behemoth and Leviathan. Aedric chatted with his retainers, four humans from Caecely, home to the infamous caecillians. Mateo the Magic-User, Theresa the Thief, Carlotta the Cleric, and Francesco the Fighter explained that they were massive worm-like beasts sometimes farmed for their milk.

The Lost Vineyard: Session Four

 

 

Aedric, Josian, and Vraifigi awoke to find a note from Gwimbly telling them he had left to go join a halfling guerilla group. As they discussed their plans for the day, they heard the sound of galloping hooves. Amalia Benedek rode into their camp and tumbled off her horse, who immediately collapsed. She started cursing and kicking it. Josian made a movement to save the horse with the healing power of Mercy, but Aedric pulled her aside. The horse required more divine intervention than the two of them combined could muster and it would be best to stay out of the way of the new heavily armed and armored arrival. Amalia explained that she'd been fighting in the crusades in the Sanctuaries until she and her horse were blown off course by a djinn whirlwind. Completely unaware of her sister's demise, she joined the party to sate her bloodlust. After all, there was a dragon wyvern to kill!

The Lost Vineyard: Session Three

Josian stumbled back into the Megaron's cellar to find Aedric had woken up. He wasn't surprised to see a new face, other people had to have heard the rumors of this place, and surely some of them had to be insane enough to go investigate. Both of them were surprised when Vraifigi popped out from behind one of the Megaron's cyclopean stone walls. 

The Lost Vineyard: Session Two

 

Ancient Stone Tower by William Henry Holmes

Márta Benedek awoke to find her companions fast asleep. Blaming the laziness of alcohol-drinkers, she squinted into the rising sun to see two figures walking towards the Megaron.

• Josian, a woman with short hair and a red scarf, marking her as a Lawful worshipper of Mercy in its original aspect, here to restart the winery
• Charl, a bearded man with colorful poofy clothes over chainmail, sporting a zweihänder and massive codpiece, here for the same reason

The Lost Vineyard: Session One

My friend mellonbread has been toying around with Skerples' Monster Overhaul. He recently used it to write up a little adventure, which I thought was really cool. So my regular Delta Green group (plus some other folks) is taking a break to play some OSR.

ANGUISHEDWIRES session three

After a long hiatus, it's time to run ANGUISHEDWIRES again! Or rather it was, since I ran it last night. The usual crew couldn't make it, so it was up to Litho resuming his role as Octavia, and a new join, Goliath, who dropped in with Zo, a man almost religiously devoted to martial prowess.

I'd finally written up enough of an equipment list to start using it, so it was time to shop. Between sessions, Octavia had recruited a cadre of eleven hirelings, for a mere 56 SP per day. Four men-at-arms, two crossbowmen, three porters, and two thieves, all of them 2nd level. At thirteen strong, the party crossed the river and marched into the dungeon.

ANGUISHEDWIRES session two

 

 

 

After restocking in Brazenkragg, the party headed back to the dungeon to plunder more of its riches. They stopped to chat with the lumberjacks in the lumber camp, and discovered that the charcoal burners had been acting strangely lately. They were all secretive and "their faces were stained with guilt." The party shrugged and headed off into the forest to find the dungeon entrance. But tarrying in the camp had given a group of bandits their chance to sneak up on them. After a few rounds of combat, they fled. K'rizzt struck down one with a single stroke while Márta weaved between the arrows their leader tried to rain down on her. OSE's random treasure table for bandits yielded nothing on the bandit's corpse, so they continued.

ANGUISHEDWIRES session one

Two years ago, I played in a dungeon crawl. It was pretty fun, despite us basically dying horribly every session. I asked my friend mellonbread for the dungeon's music tracks, printed off the floor maps, and hopped into the discord call. Our three musketeers were:

Márta Benedek, a devout Muslim from the ever-swelling ranks of the Benedek family (a female dominated clan who turns its daughters loose on the world as adventurers).

Octavia, an educated woman, both an alchemist and an arcanist.

K'rizzt Tri'Orgen, a "connoisseur" of dark elf culture so obsessed that he'd dyed and painted his skin to look just like them.

A History of SWORDS (and how to fix them)

Chainmail, OD&D, and Magic Swords

One of the classic tropes of D&D, for good or ill, is the magic sword. A sword that is just magically better at doing its job of hurting and killing people. Maybe it has a few other properties like glowing blue in the presence of orcs or evaluating the "alignment" of the person holding it. But at the most basic level, it's a +1 sword. When you make an attack roll, you add an extra +1 to the D20 on top of whatever you would add from your class or ability scores, and you add an extra +1 to your damage roll. However, in OD&D, the latter was not the case and magic weapons only improved your chance to hit.

Unsurprisingly, this is not incredibly impactful. You're increasing your chance to hit by 5% and your damage by about 20%. However, players mostly care about their hit-chance as that's what they get immediate feedback on. Additionally, the damage boost is not as impressive as it might seem once you realize its goal, reducing the enemy's HP to zero. Against an enemy with 1 hit-die (HP rolled randomly), the chance for a single sword-stroke to slay them only increases by ~10% when you add +1 to your damage roll. This conflicts with the supposed idea of magic swords as presented by both Chainmail and OD&D. Each one was supposed to be a rare thing with its own personality and name. That's a level of importance that doesn't seem fitting of such a slight increase in fighting ability. However, this makes more sense when you realize that OD&D was initially supposed to use Chainmail's combat resolution system.

Rolling up a Wizard for Begone, FOE!

One of my friends, mellonbread, wrote up a dungeoncrawling game. If you follow the blog, you've seen me mention it before. I've been helping him turn it into a complete system by writing up a bestiary. Most of my inspiration was drawn from B/X, though I grabbed some cool monsters from AD&D and other editions and retroclones. A lot of these monsters are people, or rather, humans with class levels. 

This poses a particular problem for magic-users, as their spell selections are to be determined randomly. Lots of other games make this pretty easy. A wizard has a number of spells of a certain level that they can cast per day. You consult the table and roll up the appropriate amount of spells. WotC made it even simpler in 5e by giving archmages and priests set spell lists in their statblocks.

However, that doesn't work for Begone. There aren't any spell slots per day of a certain level. It's more vancian than any TSR or WotC edition of D&D ever was. The more powerful you are, the more powerful spells you can hold in your head. This could either by one big spell, a lot of little spells, or a mix of something in between. So how do we decide what "loadout" a wandering wizard has?

Bears Fruit Dungeon Review

Woah, what's this, top hat? A post about an OSR game? We thought you'd totally abandoned the Old School Renaissance for Delta Green.

My internet friend Jojiro wrote a solo module called Bears Fruit and people thought it was pretty cool. I also thought it was pretty cool and decided to review it since no one else had. Also my blog was in some desperate need of some Spears-related content. You can find Joji's blog, Dungeon Antology, in the sidebar of this one! There's some cool stuff there.