Friday, August 15, 2025

Session 10 - Playlog - Corrhéo




 As it worked nicely last time and I'm forever a creature seeking habit, I'll offer another ToC.

  1. Working Player's Survey of Corrhéo
  2. Session 1 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "To Bero's Boon"
  3. Session 2 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "The Stakeout"
  4. Session 3 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "Resolving Veel"
  5. Session 4-7 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "Players Split
  6. Session 8-9 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "The Mine & the Prison"

Since I didn't get to 

/ Retrospective: How AI will fails you
/ Making imprisonment complex
/ The fear of darkness
/ How faeries have entered my weapons

All grouped under but not originating in:

/ Session 10

/ Retrospective: How AI will fails you


I don't know how well this moment in my thinking will weather time, but important to write down what you see happening. 

My relationship to AI has been roughly equivalent to my relationship with social media, maybe. Initially an excitement, an indulgence, a sense of 'riding the ride', a recognition of the social landscape that begins to develop around it, a sort of quiet shame, a self-questioning, a seeing of failures, a setting aside, a revisiting. 

A has-it-changed. 

I don't think these are 1:1 thoughts. The two are not the same. But I have come and gone on social media at various point, making and deleting accounts, using fake names, trying it for business only, building restrictions for myself, over-indulging, and ultimately settling on a weird quasi-relationship that finds the least healthy moments are the moments when I'm really trying to study whether it's good for me or not, whether it's a Good Me or not. I don't know that this relationship will change, but I get a little smile at the side of my mouth when I realize that this is another moment of assessment.

I do want to pick at the scab some, of AI, which I've yet to do. Social media is whatever. I'll deal with it elsewhere. AI is not 1:1 with social media.

I've found some very effective uses. I solved my air conditioning on my trailer. I've scraped fast probability charts in an effort to make decisions faster. I decided not to jack the roof of my remodel by asking questions of AI. 

But bombs, I've also developed lesson plans for ESL classes, fast dialogues for students with large blank spaces to be filled in. I've brainstormed ideas for kids in a biology field class. And recently, around Session 6, I did a bit of brainstorming alongside AI that ended up failing me tremendously and I thought about it for awhile and believe I know why. I'll just state the reasoning and then back it up a bit with the use case: I think that AI-generated content is not intimate

I think that AI-generated content is very cool. It is amazing to watch the machine work. It is amazing to watch it personalize itself to your requests and what it knows of you, and ultimately the scale of what it can generate, the raw quantity of content it can put out, is astonishing. Just like watching a factory produce candies or hot dogs or whatever. 

But roleplaying at its best is intimate. There is an intimacy between characters and DM, between a player and her character, and between a DM and her world. There are moments when things become so intimate that that boundary ceases to exist. The DM becomes her world. The player becomes her character. We don't associate with each other within the restrictions of our relationships, but instead simply create something together that is almost born. It's a very precious thing, and only sometimes does it happen.

Other times we're much more aware of ourselves. 

But for me anyway, that's the thing I chase. Spontaneous intimacy. I'm not sure what it does. It's not commodifiable. It's just a thing that fills me so me and my players walk away gushing.

Very metaphorical, but very real.

So, AI use-case and my proof.

My players were in Bast. You'll recall this if you've been reading along. They fell into combat and killed some agents in a bar. They also had every intention of visiting Zugg Dax's adopted family farm collectThe Collect has strong trade in wild rice, rye flour, the ‘Brunswick Blocks’ (q.v.), chive butter, eggs, and cress. Secondarily in all matters of husbandry (though this has dropped off a bit since Zugg’s trip), dyeing and cutting dresses or saddles, and, more quietly, ‘security.’ These Zugg would surely recognize on sight:

—in family proper, Dallas Brunswick, the margrave, early 60s, hale, savvy, shrewd;
Rebecca, margravine, 55, who sings in the evening, makes fine preserves, and the so-called ‘Brunswick Blocks’ (very hearty seed cakes, with bog yarrow , berry, and angelica);
Jason, 23, heir, and an excellent horseman;
May, 17, a dyer and weaver of real local repute, and the one who finds the dewcaps for trade (no one knows how, or asks);
Pearl, 15;
Dallas Jr, 6.

—& among the hands, Ficus, or ‘Miss Lee,’ an elderly, blind berrylman servant in charge of the bog yarrow and the hogroot patches, and the little glen therefore;
Skulker, Miss Lee’s wolfhound, a kind of seeing-eye dog who ages very slowly—has been in strong adulthood for near 15 years;
Forrest, the metalworker and welder—Zugg, Dallas, and May also know him as a Stand colonel gone rogue for cause;
‘Willie, Esquire,’ 40, a dark-skinned ploughboy, very sturdy, & thought to be half-dumb, though he speaks exclusively in pithy epithets; & the six ‘fieldhands’ (Thaddeus, Clive, Simon, Judith, Shyera, Samuel) living barracks-style northeast of the old silo at the Yaddish border, calling themselves ‘Old Thunder.’ Time to time, a green Zugg made seven.
before they did any killing but they stopped in a bar and did some killing. 

The immediate drama revolved around these killings, obviously. I began to make assumptions about what would happen as a result. They would investigate What's Duethe dissective end of druidry, jailers, torturers, executioners, judges, and Investigators; rigorously in search of cleanliness; as feared as the Stand is mocked, surely. They would go to the farm collect, possibly. The local 'police' would regulate things. I needed to have answers for each of these scenarios because I hadn't fleshed out anything. When I look back on my pages from these prep sessions, they are brimming with details. 







I'll tell you what: I ran out of time. I spent so much time prepping the What's Due engagement, making a little 8-point adventure ("The Old Perny Worship House: Bast's well-endowed Church of Hold & once-orphanage has been commandeered in its disuse by high-paying renters") that I was running out of it. 

Maybe an hour or something until session?

Weeks later after this prep-session having run five to six games with less than an hour prep apiece to plenty good results, I smh. Stab my heart. 

So I turned to ChatGPT and was like: let's talk. Or more accurately, you talk. I'm out of talking time. Read this, tell me what sort of plants might be on this field. Let's aim for 'slightly magical but not to the point of being useful beyond food and trade'. 

Boom, listThreshbarley – Heavy-headed grain that grows in threes; husk splits with heat not threshing.
Bluecorn – Cold-hardy maize with dusky kernels; ground into dye-rich meal.
Candlewheat – Pale, waxy grain used for breads that stay fresh for weeks.
Greenspelt – Ancient, low-gluten grain resistant to blight; long simmer required.
Quellrice – Wetfield crop with calmative properties; a staple among older folk.
Sparrowmillet – Short-growing grain sown between larger crops; eaten by all classes.
Cinder Rye – Grows fast after fire or soil stress; used in emergency planting.

Roots & Tubers
Knuckletatoes – Fat, gnarled tubers that grow in clusters; sweet but starchy.
Redcleft Beets – Dual-veined root used in brining and pigment.
Goldnut Yam – Gilded-skin root with a buttery taste; luxury starch.
Saltcarrots – Thrive in brackish soil; have a faint mineral taste.
Burronions – Hairy-skinned alliums that store exceptionally well.
Stoneleek – Leek variant with a fibrous base prized for stock.
Ironparsnip – Earthy, tough, mildly metallic taste; needs long roast.

Leafy & Fruit-Bearing Crops
Fenleaf Cabbage – Swamp-adapted green with loose heads and bitter bite.
Spindlebean – Climbing vine with twisting pods; young shoots edible.
Wispgreens – Fast-growing, faintly luminous salad green; loses glow when picked.
Torchberry – Bramble fruit that glows faintly when overripe; used in preserves.
Plumtomat – Small, purplish fruit with tangy, almost spicy flesh.
Fallowgourds – Hollow-bodied squash used as bowls or musical instruments.
Bloodfigs – Oozing red fruits that ferment easily; consumed carefully.

Herbs & Medicinals
Hearthmint – Sharp-tasting herb burned in sickrooms and winter feasts.
Sleepleek – Mild sedative leaf brewed into tea; mildly addictive.
Gilfern – Bitter, fibrous herb whose smoke drives off rotflies.
Chainroot – Ground into paste for setting bones or binding sprains.
Sagevine – Twisting vine with waxy leaves; brewed into clarity tonic.
Thornmallow – Flowering plant with soothing sap and stinging hairs.

Utility & Specialty Crops
Lintreed – Blue-flowering fiber crop for clothing, netting, and binding.
Branethatch – Roof-thatch reed that bends but never breaks in wind.
Ashfrond – Charcoal-rich plant burned for ink and warding powders.
. Quellrice that's vaguely soporific; asparagus that glows faintly at night. It was cool stuff. It was poorly named. It was simple combinations of unexpected things. It was all based in the real world. I was writing it down when I could stop myself from asking more questions. AnimalsAnimals:

Herd & Labor Animals
Greathorns – Broad, slow cattle with spiraled horns used for plowing and milk with slight numbing properties.
Blassox – A heat-tolerant ox with white hide and black tongue; thrives on dry weeds.
Whicksters – Shaggy goats with a taste for metal salt; their breath smells faintly of copper.
Croptail Mules – Short-legged, strong-backed hybrids, bred to resist hillside erosion.
Brindle-Sows – Fat, striped pigs who forage efficiently and birth in high multiples.
Clayhoof Drayders – Pack-beasts with wide, dish-shaped hooves suited for muddy roads.
Hallowhens – Pale, egg-heavy birds that roost in cryptic, high places and sing low harmonics.
Flaxbirds – Flightless avians whose long neck feathers are combed and spun with linen.

Fence & Field Fauna
Hurdleharts – Small, antlered ungulates that leap hedge-rows; once sacred, now pests.
Skyrams – Tufted-horn sheep that bellow at cloud cover changes; prized for thunderwool.
Needleback Boars – Bristly swine with back-quills; useful for clearing brush, dangerous when cornered.
Dimgeld Ponies – Sure-footed, half-feral, used for hill-tilting and youth trials.
Pellwings – Black-furred chickens with flapflights of two meters; unpredictable but popular.
Rotdogs – Half-wild hounds bred to scent spoiled root or deep mold; rarely liked.
Thorncats – Barn-prowling cats with thick haunches and spiked tails; the bane of burrowmice.

Burrowers & Rodents
Quist – Large, burrowing rodents used for early frost detection by their migration.
Grist-hoppers – Grain-colored hares that shed edible, bitter fur.
Mireferrets – Swamp-trained, ribbon-bodied hunters that scent out eggs or root-grubs.
Dustcoons – Masked scavengers with a habit of sorting trash by type.
Flumeweasels – Sleek, waterway-bound mustelids that keep irrigation clear.

Pond & Margin Creatures
Reedjaw Toads – Huge, croaking amphibians that bloat when storms are coming.
Wimpling Ducks – Heavy, silent ducks with bright under-eyes, bred for stealth egg-laying.
Chalkswans – Long-beaked waterfowl that eat water rot and leave fine white waste useful as lime.
Blotfish – Farm pond fish that turn color if soil runoff is toxic.
Loopneck Eels – Raised in barrels for brine-flesh; they knot around sticks for easy catching.

Companion, Unusual & Borderline Creatures
Singerslugs – Glowing slugs used for gentle light in children’s quarters and nighttime stables.
Whistlechickens – Loud, scrappy birds bred to alert at intruders or unusual sound.
Glimmercows – Born only once per ten years; give milk said to be lucid-dream-inducing.
Knucklehorns – Stubby deer bred down to the size of dogs; used as companions or garden grazers.
Candlehoots – Night-faring barn owls with pale eyes and wing-tips that glow when near feverish animals.
? What about some of the ways a Rot might begin to creep into this. Let's say you had a map that looked like this with five or six things on it; a pond, a glen, an underground passage from the watchers' hut to the silo?




Now it's spitting engagement at me. I'm giving it character names, it's suggesting the hound is sick, won't stop barking at people it finds familiar; forget the donkey whose lips are peeling back. Forget the blotfish in the pond turning up, the sickly color of that asparagus at night.

We walked all the way to conflict, final encounters, a blight elemental of sorts, a lumbering embodiment of the Rot in the form of a plant-zombie version of the old wet nurse. It was cool stuff, man. I felt like I was walking along with a very imaginative friend. 

Problem was: I didn't imagine it myself to start. 

I was going to try to be my friend when it wasn't there. I was going to be a cheap knock-off of the Ever Generative Mind, and I had no attachment to any of its ideas except, 'Cool.'

So I didn't use any of it.

Okay, I've called a stand of brush 'quellrice' since, but as far as running the game that night, I didn't touch a single one of the AI lists, from Sounds of the Misnan Keep to Upgrade Suggestions for Corteya's Shop After She Acquired Crystal Dust From the Company and Began to Experiment.

I have -since-, but didn't then. And still feel a little... I don't know. It feels like a resource I can call on but one I'm unsure of its caliber? I tend to prefer my blots of wisdom as like single powerful blots of a strange catharsis, something that when I manage to spend the time untangling my handwriting and reading it, I'm exported—I'm sent to—another place where I was when I blotted? And with AI, I mean, it pumped out such a place for me and so quickly, it just didn't register with the slow impact of an actual thought. Maybe I'm just not fast enough to be intimate with a robotic idea, but I don't know if I can help that, and so I  let it pass. Say, 'cool, that's really impressive; doesn't move me.'

And if it doesn't move me, I can't use it to move other people. Which is all I'm trying to do.



/ Making imprisonment complex


This is ongoing. I'm still making imprisonment complex.

One of the more individualistic characters, Maddeson of Genemene, turned themselves in to the \Corrhéonic Stand
as resulting from them killing young men of What's Due in Perry's, the bar. Maddeson'd fled town with the group, but returned. They buried their weapons at the crossroads before town in a very cinematic moment. But now they were in prison.

Okay. I started my first game of D&D ever in a prison cell. I ran my last campaign starting in a prison cell. It's a box, it has bars, you don't want to be there. Motivation by blunt force claustrophobia.

I've caught characters being bad. Being naughty in the world. Insulting their betters. Disrespecting 'my lands'. My town. Taking liberties that felt offensive. I've brought the police.

I can't say much for either circumstance. Or won't. 

Instead: Maddeson volunteered to the police to be put in a cell. Maddeson wanted justice. 

To confront justice? I don't know. Maddeson is Maddeson. I suspect Maddeson felt like if the truth of the matter was that what they'd done was wrong, they'd receive punishment in accordance with their crime. That their would be some equivalency of action and result. That the world ins't driven by chaos but instead sits on reason. Maddeson might just believe in God. Maddeson might believe in fate. I can drum up many reasons I'd do it. But my report indicates that they walked up to the gates of the Grey Misnanthere is a great fortress called Pennat Hall which is the Standsometimes "Knights of the Stand"—an order of knights drawn from the diminished upper class whose political power has faded’s stronghold. There are two rings of larger keeps / garrisons that center on the stronghold. Milsen Keep / The Grey Misnan is on the outer ring of these strongholds in the north. and reported like they were going to detention.

So now what do I do. The other characters are at a pace of adventure that I'm trying to keep. They're in a mine trying to rescue a Magister from a well. Or having philosophical chats on a mountainside about good and evil. They are not waiting for a lawyer.

This character didn't want an escape. I offered twice.

They wanted to have a trial, but I didn't want the other groups to suddenly leap forward in time, and tracking both sounded nightmarish. It has proven not, within a session of prison play, Maddeson bowed out of the current foray and turned to Play-by-Discord-Message to continue their story at a more summaratic pace.

This is exciting. I'm enjoying opening up to the idea that Maddeson would continue via a significantly different route than the remainder of the groups who are meeting in person. Maddesoon doesn't act often, but I can take it slow and provide more laborious exchange— they're on work detail building stove-edge barriers against raiders from the north— they don't -not- get to manual labor just because they want a trial! They submitted to justice! Justice is work! 

(And let me say I don't think Maddeson expects a free ride either; I'm talking brashly like my father to emphasize that I'm not doing any wrong, when I probably am.)

I think I'll make a quick chart for myself. 2d6 is the way to go right now. Great quantities, great probability. The six-sided die, man. I found a jar of them recently and didn't realize how much I love the dots compared to the numerical counters of standard polyhedral sets. I only throw 3d6 with black-dot bone-white dice now, and live for it.

2d6 Ways of Making Imprisonment Complex

  • 2 - Get bought.
  • 3 - Conscription.
  • 4 - Someone goes on food strike. 
  • 5 - Constitution checks - how can they be interesting here? Make a 2d6 chart.
  • 6 - A trio of foreigners who speak a different language are a physical presence
  • 7 - A new enemy is also imprisoned for different reasons
  • 8 - Someone makes 'friends' but really wants three strands of hair for a ritual
  • 9 - Jailbreak?
  • 10 - Sleep is hard. No lights.
  • 11 - Someone digs their way in.
  • 12 - Recess.


/ The fear of darkness


Reading through Shadowdark's rulebook, or the cheap free starter rulebook, the dominant aspect that jumped out at me and that I've held onto is light as a resource, or darkness as an antagonist. I think I've been inclined in the past to hand-wave atmospheric effects. To a degree, I'll say I still am 'handwaving' aspects of it in that I'm not hard-measuring torch durations, but .. well it feels like as DM you have a certain capacity to keep x number of elements in play near you. Depending on what you like keeping track of or that you've found actually work to create tension, suspense, and interest, these are the things you call on most regularly. Light and weather have never felt like I used them appropriately. Oh, it's raining... (forgotten thirty minutes later).

Again: vested interest here in continuing to get better at DMing. Three characters enter a mine. The mine has no torches and no built-in method of lighting. 

This, if you're reading along, was/is the trio of Godfrey, Peets and Zahir. Magister Hardy had come stumbling down the mountainside as they were pondering which character to follow and convinced them to save Wygmy, to save fellow Magister Kohl. Evidently, they'd suffered a horror in the depths of Wygmy's Silstone Jet VeinI've been leveraging, for my mind's sake in prep, the idea that 'the proximity of nearby hexes drives action', rather than engaging in random plot developments on a broader scale. For instance: rather than drawing on my more than obvious fascination with the mysterious workings of Carga the Electric Lord, I rolled Lord Wygmy into play from Villa Chi's 2d4 chart, as the Siltstone Jet Vein is right nearby.

At first I thought this was just going to be a way of curtailing PC action so that they didn't decide to tromp through 3 hexes in one day. Lord Wygmy and his magisters would disappear when PCs opted to go trap otter instead.

But it struck me that the PCs had set something in motion by going to Villa Chi and seeing him. So I set him in motion with one of Alexander's / (whoever invented it?)'s faction clock. Now each time downtime happens between adventures, I will likely advance the clock.

As a result, in three downtimes, Wygmy will have gained access to the seam of jet in Lord Wygmy's Siltstone Jet Vein.

Then I imagined the changes to the area. Suddenly there are imports and exports. There are environmental disruptions. Nearby hexes are re-shaped with new populations of travelers, laborers, protesters, etc. This would, presumably, shape the landscape nearby the PCs.

So, though the PCs had no proper interaction with Wygmy outside noticing him, he becomes a form of 'faction' or 'weather event', similar to what I'm imagining happening with the Almanac, where hexes through which the PCs travel 'bloom' after their departure, so as to change for their return trip back through. Familiar landscapes laced with rain.
, which he'd finally gained access to. He being Wygmy.  

They arrived at the site in the evening, and this is the second time an adventuring foray has gone into an adventuring site directly on arrival. Again, thinking perilous aspects of reality that are hard to keep close to mind: nighttime exhaustion and bedtime habits. If a group traveling all day arrives at site and there is imminent ... threat? in that location, is it imperative on them to enter? How does this affect their bodies and minds? 

I'm allowing tangents from every direction to enter the body of these thoughts like so many arrows into the body of a sagging Swyver. I'm remembering David Hoskins illustration in Swyvers, which I hope he won't mind me referencing now. Picture this short set of thoughts at Gustave's, riddled with tangent arrows.

This portion of the essay, as a metaphorical body.
crd: Swyvers / David Hoskins


Okay: so darkness. The Company arrives in the dark. They know that this Lord Wygmy and another Magister are in that mine. That something has killed a lot of people, miners, guards. That it's imperative they go in and save them. But they also don't know anything, really, about Wygmy, about the mine. They have zero intel and are driven by a sort of internal set of heroics that may or may not guide them appropriately. But they're brave. They're level two. 

Recall: Shadowdark says darkness is an antagonist. Light is a resource.

They started talking about all the things they were doing and it became sort of petty of me but also important for me to be like: guys, you can't see -anything-. You can hear some things, but you've got this mental picture all wrong, okay?

Oh, they said. 

Yeah. So let's talk this through again. The tunnel has sloped downward like a caterpillar crawling down the branch of a leaf. You sense the space opening up, but your hands don't give you much as the cavern widens..

Quick tangent arrow coming in: I've been sewing different potential encounters in the area to make it more likely the characters would get drawn in. Wygmy's has always been inhabited (by its initial descriptionImmediate: On an unencumbered hill that juts up like an incisor is a seam of black jet struck through with pyrite inclusions thick as a human head.

Deeper: Yes, it has been found and even has been claimed, though Lord Wygmy's range of enforcing power is limited to routine surveyors and "mineralists" who continue to sap his money redrawing plans of attack for freeing the enormous wealth of gemstone without bringing the entire hill down in their efforts.

These efforts remain as crude scaffolding of imported timber [mud-caked].

Within the seam whose jet runs into the hill nearly 2/10ths of a mile, a family of aquatic perapsi paddle about in a series of freshwater pools and falls whose dark hollows are lit by the energetic sprig fae ever tapping the jet for light and warmth.
) with the perapsi and the sprig fae. That's it. This, of course, to have some sort-of indigenous culture or existing culture that might revolt or exchange with the PCs as they come in at Wygmy's behest. Honestly when I first wrote the landmark, I'd imagined PCs would be serving the miners or Wygmy himself (and when he rolled into the campaign, he was trying to figure out how to gain access so the option was there). Regardless: at some point I felt that the Jet Vein didn't have enough 'creep' into the world around it -- the perapsi being sort of homebodies and the sprig fae being similar. So I introduced the biñas, or soot beetles

As I reckoned, the soot beetles were tertiary to the other two major elements, but once I knew that Wygmy had penetrated the mine properly (by himself without PC aid), and once I knew that it wasn't good for him, I let the beetles free. These things just consume fire. The notion of jet as a mineral is further honoring the peat / bog aspects of Corrheo, the softer burnable aspects of Corrheo, and so something that eats old stone+wood materials made sense to me and that it ate high-carbon things was also neat to me. 

But this became a potential challenge to players. If they lit a torch (which they did, obviously), the beetles came. And they were pretty big. Not 'immediately kill it' big, but 1-2' big. And they swarmed light sources. 

Wygmy's Silstone Jet Vein is this standard adventure site size I've been sort-of hooked on for the length of the campaign so far. It's six nodes/rooms/spaces big. But man: when light is threatened, six rooms started to feel like a megadungeon. The players got so hung up at every juncture or turn that they managed to find only Magister Kohl and about turned around right there. He was two rooms away from the entrance.

Granted the fae were also utilizing mind control so there were additional terrors, but really, if the whole thing had been lit up and the little sprites had been realized for what they were, it wouldn't have been ... 1/4 as intimidating. 

As it stands, this particular group has now run 3 sessions at and in the mine, and have been to three of its six spaces. They feel simultaneously compelled to 'complete' a tour of it, but also really fraught with the frustration of its impermeability. Light without fire. They don't have light without fire. This has been good. This has felt very Shadowdark, to me.


/ How faeries have entered my weapons


I mentioned mind control. The sprig fae are playful but dark. They exist in the caves in a healthy equilibrium with the perapsi (and probably elsewhere across Corrhéo but for now, just here). The initial mining group that went into the mine, Wygmy included, were swarmed by the things. 

So first sighting of this sprig fae, it's got Magister Kohl at the bottom of a dark well. It's briefly torch-lit. It's got a perfect little body and he's saying 'I love digging. I love digging' and the creature's saying, 'You love digging. You love digging.' It's all very playful and horrible, right?

PCs are immediately horrified anyway. But he's 25' down and they're 25' up and there's all the stuff I just finished talking about regarding light, so lights go out and now they can just hear the Magister digging (I imagine the little creature made him step off the well edge in the dark, breaking both his legs when he hit the ground). 

Okay: PCs are here to rescue Kohl, whoever he is. They climb down and spook off the faerie. Then they've gotta get him out. That's a struggle. None of their equipment is lined up for mountain rescue. None of them are exceptional at figuring out a way to get him out. Plus they're small. A goblin and a waifish priest up at the top, the big guy down at the bottom. No light, nothing to tie to. 

So they all come down the well. I keep calling it a well but it's really a big circular pit. There's no water.

They gather up. The waifish priest gives him a good healing but doesn't set the bones right so he's healed a bit crooked. He's a bit cranky, obviously. Three days under mind control. Hands are in rough shape too. They're not meant to dig, them Mitts of Aristocracy.

PCs decide they can't make it back up and out this way. Okay. Well: there is a dig-out that goes deeper into the mine (and yeah, eventually you'd find your way out that way). But it also leads through these honeycomb passages with tiny faerie tunnels that allow the sprig fae to move about the mine in the way of an ant. And again, there's no light. 

So PCs bottom out exploring alternatives at the sprig fae citadel. 



Really just my opportunity to celebrate stalagtites/stalgmites for a little while. Nobody's attacking them even if they spooked the one that had Kohl by the mind-leash and I and they think it's pretty much a sure death if they 'invade' the sprig fae sanctuary but they're being cautious so I let them stare across its celebrated depths. They make the decision to turn. But they also made (a moment ago) the decision to let Kohl stay behind attached to a rope. He didn't want to go any deeper; he wanted them to rescue him. 

Okay: as a DM I think half of my work is dismantling my reaction to things I react to emotionally as a human and channel it through the environment instead of my heart. Characters making assumptions about how NPCs will react is one of those things I react to dubly. Characters assuming success or assuming 'this will just happen if I say so' is another. In this case: they left Kohl behind on another long leash and I'm like.. well this place isn't safe, and there's these faerie tunnels you just came through, and all you really did was spook the sprig fae away; it didn't disappear or go to bed or go work on its next book project. It's probably just lurking, watching you. So when you leave the Magister alone by himself...

When they got back to him, he was gone. And not far gone: he was back up the tunnel, under mind control again. But this time the faerie was aware of the PCs. So broke-healed-and-clumsy, the old man was a sort of strange puppet attacker who floundered against Godfrey's armor while Godfrey tried to push past him to the puppet master. 

Again, all this in the dark. And all this so close to the fae sanctuary... all this clanging and noise. 

One little bonus sprig fae popped out of the tunnels behind them (I've been obsessed with ambush and changing the nature of the fight midway through it). 

It told the waifish priest that the waifish priest was no longer the owner of his own body. And this little whisper was strong enough that it was true.

No light. An old man thumping on mercenary armor. The priest suddenly seeing only a purple-black peach where it should be able to see player action, decision, etc. Shit got desperate. Peets, eternally young goblin, threw his knife. The fae had high AC. 18. But 1hp. 

Godrey swung his barbed sword. Another high strike. 

Both fae dropped in a round. Kohl recovered and collapsed. Zahir shuddered and recovered himself. 

Run, everyone said.

And that's where we ended that session.

But: it was my brother's birthday soon after. My brother plays Peets. We were driving up to go camping. My wife had lapsed into silence beside me. I was high on a marijuana soda. So was he.

I looked at him in the rearview. 

'As Peets grabs his weapon and runs down the hall behind his friends, the knowledge that his knife has become sentient dawns on him.'

He just said, oh shit, and then we went on to camp and celebrate and sober up and cook marshmallows and so forth.

So: designer thoughts on this moment. 

The sprig fae were never meant to be an antagonist directly. Sure, they caused mischief, and sure they got upset at this Wygmy guy and his miners, but they were angry the way a very 'playful' group of wasps would be. The PCs didn't -really- choose a side, or certainly didn't go to the lengths that a devoted group of side-takers would: going through the city, unrooting the wasp nest, spraying it with chemicals, finding the queen, looting her treasured honey. They just got Kohl and bailed, but getting him ended up in the death of two of these beautiful little creatures. I had even given them names. 

So when they just got slaughtered, part of me was very sad. 

And that part of me said, well they don't really ... die. They just move to a new body. In this case the weapon that destroyed them. 

Now they can be complicated antagonists. On one hand: everybody wants a blade with a mind of its own. But if the mind is a mischevious dark-loving fae creature... it won't always be easy. In fact, as Godfrey was trying to climb out of the pit, the blade increased in density, 35lbs of extra metal on his back. When Godfrey stood and fought a beetle in the morning sunlight, the blade itself winced and fired chill joint-damning energy back up his arms. There'll be other moments of conflict. At one point he pissed on the blade, he was so frustrated with it.

But he oiled it too...

But I get to keep a creature I wanted to live in, and an antagonistic one to boot, while the characters get nameable weapons. 

Seems a faer trade. 



Alright. I hit puns. I'm going to skip away but leave promises to myself to talk about the following. Since starting this post I've had five more sessions (just had #15) and four new characters from three new players. 

Things are changing, moving faster. I'm trying to keep up. If only there was a Fast Thinking High-Generating Mind that Could Just Write My Summary Essays For Me...

Future ToC
/ Day Dice?
/ Plot Clocks 
/ Session 11 - 15

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Session 8-9 - Playlog - Corrhéo

Turn back through time with me. 

It is 7/2/25. Two sessions have passed; a third is brewing. These sessions have been interconnected. A player meetup happened, videos on.

Typically all is audio + whatever plant you are looking at when you are listening to other players.

Last session was probably the greatest session to date, broadly speaking. I walked away from it, set a time for two minutes, and tried to tell my wife everything that had happened.

  1. Working Player's Survey of Corrhéo
  2. Session 1 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "To Bero's Boon"
  3. Session 2 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "The Stakeout"
  4. Session 3 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "Resolving Veel"
  5. Session 4 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "Players Split"

I said the next day that 'whatever happened last night was unportable to reality' to one of the players. What I mean by that, and discussed with a potential player across the table from me moments ago, is that the session was SO SUBSTANTIAL and yet, when described in terms of plot, entirely banal.

But, in the interest of continued capacities as writers, thinkers, explorers of mark-making and its capacity to weave reality, let's try to capture it anyway and see if some of the magic can't be stored here, for you. Maybe I can turn it into something useful you can walk away with.

That would be a nice goal.

Here's my table of contents. Skip around as you like but it will all relate.

  • / Session 8
  • / Session 9
  • / Retrospective: How AI will fails you
  • / Party splitting vs the Cinema
  • / Making imprisonment complex
  • / The fear of darkness
  • / Player pariahs and the unwelcome antagonism of becoming a cult leader
  • / Goodbye


/ Session 8

Recall our players quickly:

  • Zugg Dax, an aspiring paladin who has found fealty difficult for a leader besides himself.
  • Maddeson, of Genemene, Genemene which is a hidden society whose exposure is threatened by Maddeson's employer HOOD,
  • Taamog Peets, a young goblin who now makes excellent snares, loves his brittle obsidian daggers (and any loot), but who almost died
  • Zahir the Half-Orc Priest of Balance, which he's discovered in the course of playing
  • Godfrey, the 'ex-mercenary' with family issues


Now: we leveled at the end of Session 7. That means Session 8 had new HP.

I tasked players with using the experience points I'd been granting them to summarize what 'leveling' meant to them. Experience was written in litany format, and granted in parcels of 1's mostly. Collected they might look something like:

  • +1xp for a well-stitched camp in the boonies
  • +1xp for setting the stakeout
  • +1xp for shielded calm under pressure
  • +2 xp for solving snipped snares
  • +1xp for "You are like a coypu"
  • +1xp for knowing how best to dress a gibbon
  • +1xp for dealing with small devils
  • +1xp for keeping a bit of gravewax handy

This is the 10xp that took Godfrey the ex-Merc to Level 2. 

I appreciate Shadowdark's reduced number for experience points. I don't have to get too complex in my head, I can simply reward at least one per session, and the list I make as prep provides me an opportunity to look back over the last session and think of one thing the character did that surprised me, succeeded wildly, or failed miserably. In this way they are either proving a character they know out loud, learning new capacities, or learning from failures. To me, that's a nice simple system.

Their synopses came back from poetic to straightforward. 

I took each and thought 'in what way would Corrheo offer up its magics or infuse their bodies based on the catharsis they've had'.

For example:

"Please add bloodshield to Godfrey's abilities. For each point of armor class he wishes to give to an ally, Godfrey loses 1hp. The effect lasts until he is healed. He must be able to see them."

"Zahir: add dustskin to your spell abilities. Can be used 3x per month to harden skin to impenetrability."

Everyone got fun abilities. I don't know if I will apply the same logic to the third level, but it's a bridge I'll cross after 20xp has been gained. It did shift me into think about

Sub-head:

Classless systems: I'm very tempted by classless systems. I find Shadowdark's classes are predisposed to a very specific style of play that doesn't match what I'm interested in drawing out of my players. I want players to find how magic works in themselves. I never want to hear a priest say I cast cure light wounds when the fighter next to them has just taken a sword blow that cuts to the collarbone. I'm a snob for interesting wordplay and game as plumber to the imagination's natural tendency to clog.

This means that whatever spells Shadowdark has provided, I'm avoiding desperately and instead saying: what has this character been to the group; what have they sought to do; what have they avoided doing; what would make them more capable of doing those things that they are already doing. 

Godfrey has interceded, Peets has studied enemies, Maddeson has sought perspective, Zugg wants a friend, Zahir is scared so often.

So: accentuation happened. And as I reflect now, it wasn't before Session 8. It was before 7. But very few character abilities had come out yet on this blog, so I don't feel bad.

Session 8 the characters had decided to split ways. Maddeson had returned to BastThe town of Bast is subsidiary to the Grey Misnan. Two simple streets, regular access to harvest apothecary reagents of nearby landscapes, and the frontier quality of an orderly Western town near enough to the military to seem safe. and the Grey MisnanThe northernmost point in the Corrhéonic Stand's defense network. Has dungeon, daily training drills in the bailey, and a broad basiliskian presence to turn themselves in for the murder(s) committed at Perry'sA two-floor house of bawd and booze. Tame'ish; Zugg was heading south without explained intention and fallen in with Malehu, a pilgrim, and his tiny son Cor. Malehu believed the Penitent Oasis ('an oasis on legs') would be found, and pilgrims were gathering around a prophet at The ApertureFull description in previous entries; visual portal in the high hills at which pilgrims convene and many pray. The alien technology is also pondered by knowledge-seekers. Bandits thrive. The three others, 'The Trio', bit on a hook to save Magister Kohl and Lord Wygmy in Wygmy's Silstone Jet VeinSimilarly described fully in previous entries: Lord Wygmy owns the hill and in the hill is the vein and the vein is jet but the land is hostile to his efforts at claiming 'what's his', where miners had recently opened to a dangerous realm and been lost.



/ Party splitting vs the Cinema

My only request was that though the group was split, they had to show up to sessions together until they returned to HQ, when they could join other players if they wished.

In the role of referee, I enjoy watching the improv of a roleplaying session for cut points. We have three hours together and at some point I end the night. But there are also moments to change scene, to cut away to narration, to insert new conflict.

With players spread across three locations, these cuts come more often so as to stabilize attention. Everyone wants to play.

My effort on Session 8 was to make sure that the amount of time that passed was similar in all three settings. The problem was, one group was measuring action in rounds and others were in social play. The trio stood at the door to the mine and considered whether they wanted to go in for almost twenty minutes of real time. Maddeson, on the other hand, was feeling around with their hands for a good place in the community jail room to sleep without getting ambushed. (It turns out they got ambushed anyway, and nearly got choked to death in the dark).

What this application of split party efforts resulted in was that I hyper-condensed Zugg's play to the very end of the session. I alternated between the mine party and the prison player and then every second round of this alternation, spent some time talking with Zugg via Malehu and the camp area he was in. But it was midnight. He had no need or reason to adventure, to search around. The player was comfortable with this and enjoyed watching, but I can't say every group would feel this way. It did build my sense of obligation to Zugg to provide more profound action in Session 9. 

This, to me, is the natural gameflow of campaign play.

So I suppose this would be a moment to consider, when are cuts good and when are they not?

Good cuts so far:

  • The jail door closes behind Maddeson and they seek to find their way across to a place to lay and wait for interrogation. The What's Due agent who Godfrey assaultedTurin, a local breakerman of Bast. See Session four or five for his approach of the party, the potential agent of Maddeson's guilt, grabs their ankle and seeks to choke them in the dark. No one comes to their aid. They will be suffocated under the hands of a gorilla and they will have chosen to do so, as they turned themselves in without any knowledge of what justice could mean. This could be justice. The rolls fail. Then the desperate rolls succeed. They free themselves violently and crawl to the door. GUARDS! I've been assaulted. The guards look down in the dim light, peer into the cell, and close the door. Cut.
  • The trio find the mine. They stare at its edges and try to gather information about conflict. They plan, and leave the priest aboveground. They find their way down in the dark to a stockade of barrels filled with mine goods behind which their guard contact crouches, scared shitless. They make contact and try to spook some information out of him. He has them quench their torch. He has them whisper. They hear the Magister crawling in a well a hundred feet laterally and twenty five feet vertically distant. He's still mind-controlled. They check the stockades for supplies and decide to make a small fire to draw the biñas, the soot beetles, out. To try to draw anything out. To ambush. The small flame is placed at the top of main stairs down. A whistling sound precedes the beetles, in a hushed moment as they watch from the stockade, the flame is snuffed out and their hiding space is cast into blackness. Cut.
  • Maddeson's door is opened after two tense hours of silence and darkness. The guards plus an equipoise marshal. All of them go to a room. The marshal questions Maddeson. As a foreigner, are they aware of Corrheonic justice? That it is the victims of the justice who ascribe the punishment? This would be the boy Maddeson killed's surviving family. Also: who are you? What are you doing in our country? Maddeson reveals HOOD, casts blame on HOOD for holding a knife to their people's throat. Seeks information themselves from the Corrhéonic StandEssentially the wilting knighthood of Corrhéo who hold vestigial sway over local affairs and operate less impressively abroad and in site of the wider world. The peasants are realizing this. Who is HOOD? The Stand doesn't know. But they don't like foreign agencies who are looking to gain power domestically through subversive agents who are killing people in taverns, even if the kid was a do-no-good. Maddeson has convinced them, to a degree, that Maddeson is a person of some virtue. That they could be 'trusted', to a degree enough that the marshal places an option in front of Maddeson. Wear these simple bracers of Old Corrhéic magic. They are binding bracelets. You will swear an oath to research and report on this HOOD, return information to us, and we will let you go free with a pass of justice. If you fail, they will cinch closed and you will lose both of your hands. Or, you can face justice by the family and whatever they choose to leverage against you. Maddeson chose the family then was escorted out of the room and back to the common cell. They caught a glimpse of the marshal with a curious, maybe sad, look on his face. Cut.
  • The trio realized they had no idea how to confront the beetles or the staircase. They slipped down the secondary path very cautiously, skittering rocks ahead to test for holes. They found the well. Magister Kohl was invisible in the darkness at the bottom crawling around on two broken legs with a sprig fae See the Siltstone Vein's full description for first appearance; sprig fae are waifish and black and perfect-bodied; citadel-builders among the stalagtites & —mites; touching jet in the walls warms and lights the area; focused mind control, mischievous of course (they knew it as a 'small flying devil') telling him that he loved digging, he loved digging, repeating himself that he did love digging, he did love digging, using the poor edges of his raw hands to do so. (He is perpetuating exploitation of the natural world through mining into pristine ecosystems so picture me not feeling bad about torturing my little Job with the honest truth taken into metaphorical obscenity). He was digging. They were 25' up. They kept trying to say they were doing things that were impossible without sight. I kept reminding them it was pitch-black. They had a rope. They sent the big guy down the well to rescue the Magister tying off to themselves. Their hands failed them and he fell, only just catching himself on the rock wall above. The sprig fae tapped the jet next to it and lit up the base of the well, looking up at the hanging mercenary. The charm broke. The magister just moaned, 'my legs'. Cut.

End session.

I think the big difference on these cuts is that some of the cuts leave the characters words hanging in the air, and others leave the characters themselves hanging in the air.

Most everything has to do with hanging though, or a 'ringing' sense that I think is the practice of listening for beauty.

That's a luxury many of us don't have. We're often busy with things and trying to be efficient. But a good cut, which is essentially editing on the fly, leaves a beautiful sound in the ears of those who felt it. A well struck gong that echoes through our black incapability to do anything else. I want characters to be thinking 'what the F am I going to do?'

And then also be very happy that they don't have to decide just yet.


/ Session 9

Session 9 picked up at this point, Godfrey hanging from a well-side. Maddeson being put back in jail. And Zugg in a camp. Zugg had meditated with Malehu on a number of topics. This is what Zugg's player enjoys, talking through virtues and choices. He is very exploratory of each detail, and interested in what the game generates in him. He has sent me a number of documents that will serve as appendices to all of this some day, as they have been beautiful work that has grown on the side-trail of the adventure, and deserve their own frames and treasure.

I'll share one that came up around this time, however.


/ Player pariahs and the unwelcome antagonism of becoming a cult leader

I'm leaping ahead because I've discussed Maddeson and the trio's position at length. Zugg's position was a more nuanced one. Here was a character who had taken the lead in almost every decision. They believed themselves righteous in the killing of the five members of What's Due who had confronted them and demanded that they concede their freedom. Zugg had led the party through a number of moments of stillness, demanding action or decision, shepherding the more tentative players through expression of intent.

The rest of the group had clearly indicated that this became unbearable at a point, for various reasons. This was obvious because Zugg was alone.

Now: Zugg chose to go off alone. As did Maddeson. Both players were bullish in this decision. I love this decision. It admits the truth of group dynamics. It also allows the players to see each other playing. I believe I've mentioned this before. But Maddeson alone in a prison is Maddeson speaking to me in the presence of 4 invisible audience members. The same is true for Zugg on the side of the mountain.

Now: Zugg promised Malehu that he would walk him and his son to the ridge of the hills in exchange for a shared camp last night. When he woke, he woke from a long session of watching other players play, so Zugg began circling camp. He found a bone whistle in the grasses, one decorated in carved wave crests. He laughed at this, and gave it a slight toot. He spied, in the distance, a caravan making its way along the major pilgrim road that he would carry Lehu's cart up when the man and his son were ready to make off for the day. I drew this caravan from previous encounter charts of the area, because having an encounter on the horizon always feels like a pressure that can be applied as needed when the present circumstances stale.

Now: Zugg and Malehu have talked at length and discovered a quiet, sure friendship. This is simply myself and Zugg talking in front of an audience of four. Malehu and his son had lost their mother/wife role to the Rot. They were giving up the family business (elixirs and scents made and transported along smaller northern trade routes) because they'd heard that someone had found the Penitent Oasis. A former member of the Prim Jae AscendancyAlso detailed elsewhere, an outdated sect of the Clinchin Fold who sought to capture / control the moving landmark via some energy-draining crystals; a local desert tragedy that changed the landscape significantly. On this morning, they were sad to know they would part with Zugg.

On taking our leave of camp, I knew a couple things.

  1. Zugg was going different directions
  2. Malehu and Cor were going to their doom, more or less (Corduroy is a madman and the Penitent Oasis is a high-risk myth to pursue)
  3. That all three needed friendship

I had nothing in particular to address with Zugg. The caravan was no danger and was much slower. So Malehu just took a big breath in and then felt how good this felt. To be in search of the Oasis after his wife's death. To be giving up his material life to pursue something great. And Zugg said something strange that hit me: 'Lehu: are you sure you haven't already found the Oasis?'

I was very moved by this. Because:

  1. Malehu thinks the Oasis is a physical thing
  2. So do I

So I couldn't help but refuse, but why?

And it struck me that I had to have a reason I would be in pursuit of the Penitent Oasis, and as with many of the characters revolving in Corrhéo, the answer became self-obvious fairly quickly.

The Rot.

So Lehu peeled back his shirt quietly and showed Zugg how his chest was wasted and ruined and getting worse.

This was one of those complex moments that can't be ported out into reality. This was exclusively improv and synthesis of circumstance and felt so -right- and so perfectly confounding to the situation. It felt like rolling a 20 when I needed it, without getting to roll dice. Whatever Zugg did next wouldn't matter.

Turns out, it did.

Zugg who has wanted to play a paladin in a world without paladins did what he did the last time he saw another character he ostensibly cared for fall. He asked Malehu if he could try to help. He tried to lay on hands.

There was resistance. Zugg wanted to tie the boy into the ritual by putting him on his shoulders. 

Malehu / I felt conflicted.

But they'd built a relationship. And he rolled a single roll well. 

But it's the Rot, right? It's like, one of the major plagues of Corrhéo. There are factions dedicated to its removal. Zugg is level two.

But...

Story...

It knocked him unconscious to try. I think I said something like: 'Thank God for the strength you've given Malehu, because he catches Cor from your shoulders as you fall unconscious'.

Okay, so game logistics: I sapped 5 strength from Zugg and gave it to Malehu. Zugg had insane establishing rolls as a character and has been a dominating physical presence in all combat thus far. Just lopping heads. I want to challenge that, in part. I also want to challenge the idea of 'free gifts'. Curing a character of the Rot ... nobody does that, or tries to do that. I do want Zugg the capacity to be a hero and for heroes to do things beyond their everyday fellow's capacity, but I'm all for keeping boundaries intact.

So Zugg wakes up -5 STR. He's been propped against the wheel of the cart, and the caravan so far behind has arrived with a giant bellC-08-01 - Bellwright’s Quarry

Bellwright’s Quarry produces renowned ceremonial bells, but flawed ones shatter after ringing. Superstition claims the quarry is cursed, and sabotage threatens production.

The Bellwright’s Quarry is a large open expanse of gray stone cliffs where local craftsmen have carved ceremonial bells from the unique, acoustically resonant stone for hundreds of years. Nearly all of the region’s stone bells are made here and shipped to surrounding towns and cities in the North of the channel. The bells are valued for their rich artistry and penetrating tone but are known for their flaw: after being rung, the vibrations eventually cause the bell to shatter.

Deeper: The bells are not created with magic but with precise craftsmanship and tradition. Long ago, members of the Royal Family of Old Corrheo commissioned these great funeral bells, gilded in gold and adorned with jewels, at this quarry.

But in recent years, local superstition has held that the quarry is cursed due to flawed bells. Rumors abound of unexplained tremors and strange, distant sounds echoing from the cliffs at night. Workers fear staying late, believing that the tolls of shattered bells still resonate in the stone.

The Cradle of Bells is a massive, cleared section of the quarry where the carved bells are displayed before shipping - the air is always peppered with the dust of fresh-cut stone and the earthy smell of moss-covered rocks. The ground beneath feels slightly unstable. Wagons pulled by teams of oxen traverse carry newly carved bells up the old switchback road out of the quarry and up to the Cradle. Deep grooves carved into the road suggest that the bells were once transported using large, primitive sleds, leaving permanent scars on the quarry’s surface.

A local faction, angry that their town could not secure credit for a founding bell with the quarry, has begun sabotaging the bell production. The saboteurs blend in as workers and use natural quarry hazards to conceal their activities, such as causing rockfalls or tampering with scaffolding. They leave subtle marks on the stone, weakening the bells further to ensure their eventual shattering.

Bellwright Haltren Elric, son of the Foreman , is obsessed with maintaining the reputation of the quarry, desperate to complete a perfect bell that will not shatter. He tirelessly watches over the artisans, correcting even the slightest mistake.
in it
, drawn by great beasts of burden.

Malehu sees Zugg wake up, breaks off conversation, checks in on his friend. Shows him the tranquil skin of his chest. Looks adoringly at the resting healer. Zugg doesn't feel great, but he's proud, so proud.

And that's where we left off Session 9.

Now: that phrase echoes again. 'Are you sure you haven't already found the Oasis?'

What I want to do now is transform the relationship. Malehu was on a trajectory. So was Zugg. Opposite directions. I had always thought that pursuit of the mythology of the Oasis might inform player action. But now I'm thinking: what if instead of them pursuing the Oasis, what if they were assumed -to be- the Oasis? What if Malehu became an acolyte of Zugg's. A zealous follower. If the prophecies suggest that the evergreen life of the Oasis was the necessary component in combatting the Rot... what if Zugg was perceived as an avatar or incarnation of the thing? What would happen if others began to glom on? What if this character who had been so desperate to be alone and to pursue his own goals became an unexpected or even unwanting leader of a small group of pilgrims who wept and waited at his feet?

How challenging would that be?

I think very.

So as a thank you for reading through today's writing, I'll give you one last table effort at being generically helpful rather than asking you to interpret my playthrough for helpful things.

3d4 Reasons a Character Might Get Followers They Don't Want

  •  3 — A righted log or simple environmental adjustment destroys the threat to a community. You crushed the small dictator!
  • 4 — Dogged at a distance. 

    But you said you would do it. You promised
  • 5 — Expected, mistaken, or perceived kinship aren't you my brother?
  • 6 — A performance creates spiritual transformation in a witness. They suspect divinity or otherworldliness.
  • 7 — A seemingly miraculous healing converts the healed into zealotry
  • 8 — A dangerously alluring scent
  • 9 — Unnatural physique or beauty. Someone who wants to see that, be that, or become that.
  • 10 — A psychosis state or gaseous release creates sense of Godhood
  • 11 — 1d6 flawed dopplegangers follow in an effort to understand what they're missing. Damn spilled DNA.
  • 12 — The Chosen One: by location, time, or physical appearance, its vague enough. You've finally come.

Also, clearly I didn't get to

  • / Retrospective: How AI will fails you
  • / Making imprisonment complex
  • / The fear of darkness
  • / And adding: how faeries have entered my weapons

So I'll save them for a future post.


/ Goodbye

Hope you have a good game,

- Hugh

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

good hags

V.A. Gatsuk

Introduction

I saw recently someone post a note on hag covens, on whether hags are still scary. God. Who was it. Explorateur? Mage Advice? One of these blogs. I'll find it. 

It has me thinking about the hags of my world. Hopefully I can transition this thinking into a tool or useful thing for you to walk away with, but for now I just want to understand why my reaction to the questions is: no, absolutely not. 

I'd want to do this by interpreting hags in my own community, because as with most rpg Aspects (character classes, monster types, skills and proficiencies, whatever), an analog exists in the real world, allowing the game to become, beyond a bit of fun, a means of studying the real world from a safe, blameless distance.

Perhaps I'll step into blame here.

Hags: immediate adjectives that spring to mind are ugly, outcast, alone. I erase the word 'horrid' for what it draws up regarding 'evil'. But maybe it doesn't. A horrid stench is an offensive one. I'll add it back in. Hags brim with a sort of 'offensive presence', whether the quality of their warts or the stench of their breath or the shrillness of their cackle. 

Let me open up this discussion to include the notion of male hags, which are rarer, certainly, but something I don't want to completely write out of the storybook. I think men are rarer to be labeled hag in large part because it's generally regarded as more okay if a man is alone. A woman alone had better be a widow, says society, and she better still be grieving. She better have tried to be together with somebody, society says, because women shouldn't be alone. If not, we've got all sorts of nasty words for her, whereas a man might be a hermit or a recluse or God, a Bodhisvatta or wise man who has chosen the hills or the high peaks for his meditations because Togetherness is too lowly a state for someone in pursuit of Higher Forms. 

The woman is in her hut, the man is on his peak. 

Yuck. But, these things exist. 

And let's not forget the folks between or beyond genders too.

Woof. Deep water. 

Let's go simple for a second.

I think I like, of the words I chose for hag, 'ugly' and 'alone'. I know we have this notion of a coven or a witch's gaggle, but I'll focus on the hag of my mind, which is the one out in their mud-hut, infreqently visited by Prince and Princess Lifting Their Skirts (ware the the pig shit!) because they heard Yekki Bruna might have a potion that can get him up and get her a baby. 

I want to clarify my position on ugliness before we proceed: to me ugliness is 'at a remove from conventional standards and not so by choice'. A shriveled arm is, by majority percentage, 'not the standard body structure'. Warts covering the entire face except for one eye is not the way most faces come. I'm fighting the urge to couch ugliness as anything but. Even the notion of 'deform' is not a trivial word to anyone who feels 'deformed' or who has been made to feel less than as a result of 'not matching' the conventions of their society. In fact many of these people change societies as a result of this negative attention; many of these people take their own life in order to change societies to the Kingdom of the Dead, where we all hope we are more accepted. Many of these people seek new faces, new places, masks, whatever. We all combat this sense of an Ideal that, when matched, provides some surety in an unsure world. We combat it because we think our problems derive from not being It. 

Sometimes they do. 

Sometimes though our problems are the men with pitchforks chasing our poor scarred body through the hayfields. 

This is sad to me so let me not speak about ugliness without caring for it. 

Let me put forward the Hag then as a potential Hero of Deformity, in that way. 


The Notion of the Good Hag

So traditionally I think we read in the hag a certain bitterness. 'She's angry because she's ugly and been mistreated and spat on'. This is not an uncommon convention. It's the easy read to an incomprehensible circusmstance. 

'It lives by itself because no one loves it'. 

It's also where we get notions (I suspect) for things like the hag coven. Only family could love creatures like those. We see notions of this mocked with mentions of inbreeding, in Deliverance or similar films; a full 100% of the jokes I hear about Kentucky. Again: the target locales these things crop up in are places where there are less people, again reinforcing this idea of aloneness. The Inner City Hag is a rarer convention, broadly speaking.

The Hag, however, (often referred to in their neutrality), is also a cultivator. They are usually befriended by beasts. Baba Yaga with her hut (a great monstrous chicken-leg hut); many of Miyazaki's grotesquely-faced witches who are comforted or kept company by creatures, birds, a fat cat, whatever. Something loves the hag but it is not the community whose edge she perches at. 

The Hag provides something right? It is often the potion brewer, a salve-maker. It's rarely made true that it is out in its garden making the world green and beautiful (this position, traditionally, is often left to the surprisingly winsome farm-woman), but inside the hag's hut—perhaps so that they cannot be seen or harassed by teenage idiots—is a person or creature of Manufacture. Brewing, collecting, growing. I sense the hag as something kin to a mushroom. They have aspects of decomposition, of willingness to put both hands in the body of a pig to pull out its still-beating heart and understand it as necessary, of course, for that boner potion. 

There is an aspect then to the Hag of a being at the verge of death. What is death after all, but that very loneliest of places? (At least until we get over the bridge and meet all those ghosts supping at pools of blood in the earth and join them in slurping; all of them willing to overlook our flaws or make no note of social convention anymore). 

We have seen a huge burst of interest in mushrooms, broadly, in literature. Go watch Fantastic Fungi. Go read Mushrooms Demystified. Go read about the use of mushrooms on breaking down oil spills or watch a Joe Rogan podcast at all. I don't find any of it particularly central to whether mushrooms are good or bad, it's just clear that we are coming onboard with mushrooms as something other than aspects of cheese worth cutting off. Rot and decomposition are a central focus as we aim our environmental lens on how waste goes away, because heaven knows we know how waste is produced, right? At this point? Is anyone still really wondering if plastic is a problem given the Charybdis in the North Pacific? The gulls in Bacigalupi's Windup Girl are cut open to reveal straws and microplastics. (But they're in our shampoos to get rid of dandruff and old, dead hairs and we need them to swirl our iced vanilla lattes, don't we?).

Anyway: we know plastic is a sin and we know our overproduction of waste materials identifies that we overconsume unnecessarily and are passing this off to the Unknown Future World to put up with. Given these knowns, some of us are fascinated with ways to counteract that. One could call the fascination 'druidic' in nature, right? An act of balancing the environment? If we can make mushroom hats that fall to the ground and break apart on our death (Stamets) then have we not done something -good-? Have we not counteracted something? The great machine pouring liquid plastics into molds over and over again somehow suffers a tiny, mousey blow? One less set of hands at a factory in China, and the subsequent lack of one tiny billow of black smoke overhead, crawling towards Korea?

Sure, all tiny, but we are tiny.

Regardless: mushrooms—the zeitgeist, generically, has mushrooms in its guts, growing. Look at proliferation (ha) of things like The New Weird, of Annihilation by VanderMeer. Of the hagworlds in Baldurs Gate 3. Flash back fifteen, twenty years, these weren't the mixed-moral exploration zones of the games and books then. Certainly not with the same propensity or 'is it really bad, the swamp?'. 

Perhaps I'm speaking over my pay-grade here, and simply riddled with my own obsessions. But it does make think that hags, mushrooms, the world at the edge of the City of Factories and Castles is more 'in the right' anymore. I don't know that there's Glory in the Heights of the Skyscraper, or even Space, as there was in years past. 

Or if there is, it's circumspect surely, and falls pretty easy under the weight of any reasonable scrutiny.

This to say: if anything's scary, really, in the Now, for me, it's wizards. Technocrat wizards. Robes made of sharp, white polyester. Towers free of dust. Elemental winds chained to the floor. Bleaching agents. That scent not of death, but entrapment. Of being kept alive under the drip. The hag mixes and makes, fuses so that things continue to dissolve as appropriate. The wizard suspends in horrified stasis for study. If that wizard happens to operate under the protection of a kingdom, or shows up at the wildest parties, drunk on some stupefying pink sparkly drink, the more horrifying. These are your liches, perhaps, or somewhere before it. Somewhere in the decision making process, when the wizard is still grappling with their own mortality and aspirations, eager to trap themselves in this world, rather than be eaten by the earwigs.

Let's sum this up. I don't want to bore you. 

Mage Advice was trying to determine how to make the hags of Curse of Strahd as horrifying as possible. Evidently (I've not read the module, only played to the gypsy caravan, and only once in perhaps the wrong company for such an adventure) they eat children. 

Okay. I'm just not sure it would be hags doing that. 

Now, I grant, these things can be written into the literature—into the game—and therefore We Must Attend to the Literature. But I say fuckallthat. 

It seems Mage Advice is trying to gather ways to make Hags more powerful, not more horrifying. 

So this blog post in response seems to rotate around several things: 

1) an explanation that hags, as entities, should not be made horrifying, but instead made a valuable contest of morality. 

A hag holding a dead child over a cauldron is a morally complex circumstance: why is it holding the child this way, we ask? It must be for the hags own betterment right? (And not that the child suffered a horrid case of birwoin plague and the waters of a curative must be soaked in what comes from the buboes to save the community

.

.

.

 right?) 

2) that there are everyday hags. Hags who are removed from the contest of sexuality and other social ambitions. Who are, in a way, heroes to the loneliness that haunts us, each. Who are as much worth consulting for the wisdom of their tiny, rugged, colorful sanctuaries as the austere monk floating, legs crossed, at the height of the mountain. 

3) and to create something gameable, something interesting, some tool.

So, here are 


d10 Hag Hooks That Don't Involve Bitterness At the World For Being Ugly or Alone

1 — Young hag thinks everybody should get a dose of what it means to be alone. How they doin that?

2 — The hag holds court with all local cows to try to save its own, which won't speak for some reason; villagers are upset, obviously. All cows in one yard! Somethings afoot!

3 — The hag is camping and waiting for the dead they miss dearly, so really would not prefer your company. You're making an awful racket with all your dumb plotting.

4 — One person -did- get sick drinking the hag's fall concoction. They were though a legitimate pervert. 

5 — The hag's grounds have become the only source of actual growth in a town believed blighted. Will it reveal its secrets!? NO! Get the fuck off my property. 

6 — One of the hag's two sisters have died; the body has the weight of the hag's grief holding it. It drowned in the town well. No worse than any other dead body in water, but everyone thinks it is.

7 — The hag has spread wooden coins among Society Gold and those little mischief makers are converting the gold to wood, to wood, to wood.

8 — The hag has taken up refuge in the cemetery to consider something, maybe even just what grows over bodies; others don't take kindly to the prolonged visit; they've been temporarily turned to stone; the hag doesn't feel the need to explain that it's temporary, so naturally, more stone statues every day. 

9 — HAGDEATH. The house remains. Oh boy. Think of who would want that place demolished and how hard it would be to do so. The animals! Acting so smart and strange :/

10 — Hag eats a baby. Only way to get rid of what would've been a horrible future. Thank goodness her body can break it down. If she had a tongue, she'd explain. Instead there's a mushroom there.



Okay: so most of these ideas revolve around misconception, don't they. 

Isn't that just sitting back into the fundamental (and can I say fundamental without meaning base, traditional... conservative?) aspects of haghood and monstrosity? 

'It's just misunderstoooooood.' 

Well that's okay. Because that's 3/4 of the problems we face in this world. The other 1/4 most have to do with our own procrastination or an overlaying of circumstance that creates seemingly bad luck or poor timing. The major problem, major major problem (ask David Foster Wallace) is that we don't see each other right

Look a hag in the eye. Don't avert your gaze. Mehates how hags are in perennial storytime subservience to matters of Aesthetic. WHAT ARE THEY DOING OUT THERE IN THE WILD BECAUSE THEY AINT WAITING FOR A PRINCE!?...

Kk. Moralizing. Those are my thoughts on hags.

- Hugh



And since were talking about whether hags are scary anymore, we must acknowledge the admission that hags -were- scary. That there is a past we're pressing against and studying. Who made hags bad?

That's the question I walk away with.

Because I'm pretty sure you'd find another powerful entity ripe with mechanation; an entity who didn't want to be noticed and who definitely wanted to be obeyed.

Session 10 - Playlog - Corrhéo

 As it worked nicely last time and I'm forever a creature seeking habit, I'll offer another ToC. Working Player's Surv...