SESSION 4-7 - Playlog - Corrhéo

[ Editors note: I've tried my hand at making some footnotes to minimize the amount of errata that regular readers need to sift through. HTML/CSS fancery that may fukup, sorry-if-so. ]

Another session falls. I took this one in the woodshop. I've woken the day following at 2 20, unable to sleep, likely the late light tacos and chocolate chips that sent my blood sugar high and maybe never let it down. These things happen. Once upon a time, I would've thought that it was the ghost of Benjamin Franklin's late running mind keeping me up to do good things when everyone else is asleep. I suppose the optimist's mind has me still believing that, wondering why I don't treat the diseases of the body as the workings of the body instead, and deal with them in the neutral way of a DM. 

A good session, man. Sort of the end of an arc. 

The end everyone thought it would be? No. But gasps were had about the table. 

TOC - Corrheo Playlog

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"

The Play

The group has been tense. Two of the more outspoken characters who have never played with one another were at odds about how they'd reacted to confrontation with What's Due. A faction representing the harsh and dissective end of druidry. Includes jailers, torturers, executioners, judges, and Investigators. Known for their obsession with cleanliness and order. Serve as enforcers of justice feared for their ruthlessness and surgical precision. Their reputation evokes dread, unlike the derision faced by the Stand. Killings had been made in a pub near the Grey Misnan The Misnan or The Grey Misnan if preferred: a Corrhéonic outpost of mudworks and stove-edge fencing. A waist-high wall of black stones run like a long cemetery along the keepland's northern edge & the grass here is tall and the hills are golden. and the party had fled the small skirt-town of Bast like they were being pursued. 

They were and they weren't. 

Their fear made them think that they were being pursued by all parties. The Stand An order of knights from the diminished upper class whose political power has waned. Once respected, they are now mocked as relics of a bygone era. Serve as protectors and enforcers of the old ways, though their influence has drastically faded, and often stationed at crossroads and key points across the country. would chase them down, a police force. What's Due would chase them down, a false police force full of thugs (a cartel, perhaps, the closest analogy). 

What's Due was already tracking them. In fact they'd tracked them to the pub, Perry's, in Bast via a scrying glass, a glass tablet which could be 'locked on' to a living creature via simple hand gestures and which then displayed their visage to paired, proximal glasses in the hands of others. A confrontation at the Aperture C-04-01 - Aperture

Steep cliffs hall a barren valley at whose center is a crumbling, circular archway lathed in mind-breaking elder sigils and cryptic reliefs. Inside the circle, illusions phase in and out, an everchanging display of different places in time.

Deeper: This site has drawn a permanent sect of ritual inquisitors and apostate monks, both groups obsessively studying the aperture’s mysteries and how it may be controlled. Their camps dot the landscape alongside those of repentant pilgrims, the desperate, the cursed, the blighted, and the injured who have come to seek divine intervention.

None of these groups knows that this is a Well-spring Gate to the Underneath. The aperture is the key to “lock-in” one of many Underneath locations.

In the cooler evening hours, canyon trails to the camps becomes a hunting ground for desert bandits who prey on those traversing the area, launching surprise attacks to seize what meager valuables and supplies the pilgrims have. with a withered figure from Zugg Dax's storied past sealed this into play. Led to Perry's. A 'get your hands up' moment that the party responded to with stout refusal, and when the effort to capture them was put in motion with slithering shackles, etc, three youngbloods lay carved up easily on the floor and their breakerman operator held up outside. This was the end of a session. But two sessions ago.

The following session was their flight. He, the breakerman, happened to be family, and not well-loved family either. Senseless violence continued as Godfrey the Mercenary Whose Mother Died of Abuse put his knuckles repeatedly into the captive's face in broad daylight. The breakerman was his father's cousin. 

It only took the gathered crowds' shouting at them from the not-silent street for the group to break like rabbits in the morning lawn when the dogs get let loose. All of their plans to visit Zugg Dax's farm collect and pay a visit to his foster family, to collect gilfernGilfern salve: (alt. sacaia to foreigners) gilfern grows native to the northern shublands. See C-14-03 (The Grey Misnan) for a proliferation site and harvest, to 'see something new', flew out the window and the further they got from town, the more the bow drew tight on their group dynamics. 

• Zugg Dax was righteous. He had done no wrong. 
• Maddeson, Clothchilde of Genemene couldn't stand this. However, it was they who said 'run'.
• Taamog Peets was less inclined to believe one way or another but simply kept saying 'investigate'. 
• Godfrey the Mercenary didn't think it best to be seen back there.
• Zahir the Half-Orc Priest of Balance hated the killing, and kept staring at his hands even though he'd stood aside the entire time and done none of it.

What they could decide was that the scrying glass they'd pulled from the breakerman's kit that showed Zugg Dax's face had a twin and the twin was in the hands of the withered man at the Aperture, so at least, perhaps, they could break the curse. To all of my prep's surprise, they turned from the farm collect, a whole What's Due hideout, the Keep itself, and went back the way they came, into the mountains. 

They laid a trap at an old camp above the Aperture at their previous camp. A juvenile thing. Dress in what little pieces of theater they had (a barbed sword, a black cloak) and leverage the glass to make Zugg Dax appear bound nearby. Conjoined intelligence rolls competing with those of the What's Due members who set the visual binding at the Aperture led to 'Tanner' and his breakermen coming to investigate. Bait set, fat fish coming: the breakermen got close enough to smell and the group jumped them. Heads popped, throats pierced. Another bloody mess to end a session. 

This was one session ago. 

We woke up this session with a hamstrung breakerman named Cors, a huge one. I also happened to have debriefings with multiple players regarding their concerns about the direction the party was taking. Three separate beliefs that there were three ways things were going. Two of them were convinced of their correctness in opposite directions. The third wavered, uncertain, neutral, but sure that things weren't right.

So the 'interrogation' began.

Cors was pinned (unnecessarily), studied with some internal magics, and healed all in the same breath. Cors was scoffed at, but ultimately, a Steady Figure for What's Due. They were described as an orphanage for those who lost their families to Rot. They wore black not as a sign of evil but to hide the body fluids that stain the cloaks of first responders. The body of this world has a blister that needs to be lanced, he said, and yes, people shy from a lancing, so they fear us. 

A lancing is pain but sometimes pain heals, he said.

He spoke with surprising authority for a man whose colleagues lay slaughtered around him. He condemned the PCs in every way they sought to condemn him. Tell me of murder and evil, he said, when it was you who refused questioning and chose instead to slaughter boys on a barroom floor. Tell me of oaths and directive when you can't agree that you trust the man who brought you here, the man I was simply told to apprehend. 

He stared pointedly at Zugg Dax. 

The group crumbled. Zugg couldn't stand near. Maddeson couldn't stand near. Godfrey's questioning became the releasing of bonds. Godfrey, who carried the barbed sword and wore the black cloak as theater. 

They shook hands. Cors never relented. He also never looked back when they released him. When they re-united, there was something sheepish and broken in them. 

Zahir the Half-Orc priest refused to leave the spot until rites had been performed on the bodies. Maddeson and Zugg could hardly bear these pleasantries and began to walk off in silence, despite knowing that travelers approached from the Aperture. They walked in silence to a juncture, one that split either back to Bast, or 'home' to HQ and Villa Chi A tomb and open-air villa where A. RESPECTABLE, an immense yet gaunt aristocrat, holds court. His sleepless estate is frequented by sculptors, elders, and spirits, while he broods nightly in a blood-soaked courtyard.. 

The travelers came and beneath them, the ground rumbled faintly. 

A brother and sister, she with a wide-brimmed hat. 

She spoke. 

What would the characters do with the bodies? Had they come into trouble? 

Peets, Zahir, and Godfrey would leave the bodies, they said, as their rites of balance had been performed. 

This suited the pair. This was the Brother & Sister Peele, Clenns and Menae. 

They said they would take care of the bodies.

Zahir the Half-Orc priest was just finishing the last rites with head bowed to the ground when his sense of what was troubling the ground beneath them made his spine crawl. 

They left the siblings in a hurry, Peets discreetly using the scrying glasses they'd looted to capture a visual lock on the pair. It was not discreet enough. From over the next rise, the group watched the brother incant the bodies to begin to clatter, shake, and then snap to attention. They also watched the sister blow a knowing kiss directly into the scry with a wink, and the glass tablets transmogrified to a horrible bone lattice in their hands, useless.

The trio hurried off. 

At the juncture, Zugg Dax and the Envoy of Genemene had a final word with each other. 

I go to Bast, said Maddeson, because they felt I need to rectify, to pay What's Due. 

I cannot travel with someone so concerned with landlords, Zugg Dax said with venom. 

That was the last they said, and they walked in opposite directions.

When the rest of the group arrived, both were visible, a long ways off. 

A coin was flipped. Bast then. 

So Zugg Dax, who organized the mission, who had brought everyone to Bast, traveled alone, vaguely, in the direction of Plath. Abandoned, in many ways.

Pressed, Maddeson sped down the mountain sides, and despite their intention to reveal themselves, to rectify wrongdoing in the town they'd said to flee from, they continued to hide from Corrhéonic patrols which rode the Loathsome Line A treacherous prairie trail where ascetics seek hidden Wellsprings, alchemists hunt rare herbs, and corrupt knights capture pilgrims for slavery—danger stalks every traveler who dares to walk its path. from Bast and the Misnan to the sea.

They buried their weapons at the crossroads where not long ago the group had stood, deciding how to deal with their circumstance, and what to do with a runaway slave called Caln who stood in the high grasses in flight from the Custodial Knight.

As a side note, Caln had, at their urging, come with them into the mountains, his family dead now at the hands of the slavers, dressed in a Cloak of Hiding recovered by Peets. He sought PlathSituated on the southern edge of the Ashwind Mountains, recognized for its free-form spires which now host the bulk of the influential decision makers. While Drek's Landing may still hold the honor of being the largest city, Plath's rise to power is likely linked to the presence of fresh water and strong economic and cultural exchange with the countries to the south, his original home, but had no idea where he was. 

When the group murdered the members of What's Due who now walked in undeath, he slipped away dismayed. 

Maddeson failed an intelligence check as they buried their weapons at the crossroads. I interpreted the roll I called for as a successful memorization of the location of their weapons despite the failure. They did not see Caln watching them from the nearby grass, still draped in Peet's Cloak of Hiding. 

Then they walked towards town. 

Meanwhile Zugg Dax had reached the far side of the mountains. A pilgrim hailed him. The man Melehu pulled a cart with his boy Cor in it and hundreds of ceramic vials filled with anointing oils. And a handful of excellent potions. Zugg seemed relieved at friendly company. He entertained a discussion about a vagrant that the group'd met previous, a certain 'Corduroy' who was evidently part of the risen Prim Jae Ascendancy The Prim Jae Ascendancy, a  group of bejeweled mystics, were a renegade sect of the Clinchin Fold who sealed the vitality of a 520-hectare land known as the Drab Zone in a set of enchanted crystals in order to satisfy the initial steps of their reading of an encrypted prophecy of a land that moved, flush with forever-life. Their guide into the desert kept them far from the bandits and dangerous fauna, claiming with the drake’s bones she cast, that setting these vital crystals in a sort of humming trap would draw the oasis. 

All it drew however was what vitality remained of the Prim Jae Ascendancy, as bereft of the set crystals and waiting for the Oasis at their center, they began to need food and succumbed to cannibalism. The land-water contained in the crystals ebbed into the sand surrounding the Ascendants remaining, becoming ‘the Swirl’, a vast lake of quicksand that swallowed all but the guide., a group who had sought to summon the Penitent Oasis During spring and autumn, the dust nomad caravans pass through seeking the Penitent Oasis, a landscape on legs.

Without fail, some figure emerges from the masses each year claiming to know the location of the Penitent Oasis. They talk hosts of diseased and maimed supplicants to the Gaelthane's Tarn with promises of restoration and cures. and formed the Swirl, a chaotic zone of warping sand, in the process (as well as turning on each other in the aftermath). The only survivor, Corduroy's madness had been brought still by his niece and nephew, a brother and sister pair, and they'd brought him back to the Aperture for healing. He was, even now, gathering a following there. 

Curious Zugg Dax suggested they make camp together for the night. He even traded one of his precious thick platinum for Melehu's most powerful warding potion, without full knowledge of its capacity. 

The man consulted his son, his oracle, and the four-year-old boy from the cart said 'dah' and they made camp together. There they discussed 'magisters' (there are 120 that form a body who oversee Corrhéo), the Raze massive undersea dweller;
ship-wrecker;
a season unto themselves;
bodies of a make to dwell in grit
in sand and crystal
in the Silt Salt Sea;
vast and terrifying;
raw force;
so full of oil; so full of song, and what it meant to be good or evil as the would-be-paladin contemplated his new aloneness in the company of new Others. 

Zugg Dax even, depleted of rations and in a rare slip of seriousness, joked about food, and promised to escort the father and son to the crest of the hills the day following if they'd share.

Meanwhile, the group saw Maddeson until Maddeson disappeared into the tall grasses surrounding Bast. They saw the patrol pass by. And then they were desperately hailed from the foothills they were leaving. 

An old man was crawling across the rocks, seeking their attention. Magister Crowley. They didn't remember him. He'd been in discussion with Lord Wygmy and Magister Hall and A. RESPECTABLE their first time visiting Villa Chi. He was furiously seeking help. 

Wygmy's jet mine C-04-03 - The Wygmy Siltstone Jet Vein

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 perpasi paddles 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. had been opened, and something released. Thirteen miners were dead and Hall and Wygmy were charmed therein by horrible creatures. 

The group seemed more intent on mocking the man's clothing and culling ignorant details and making assumptions than helping, so he brushed them off with a wave and set towards Bast where help was sure. 

They caught up to him. 

We'll help, they said. 

He crooked his eye and sent them back to follow his tracks; they'd meet his guard Baern at the mine's entrance. A terribly incapable boy. 

He would go into town and secure more help. 

They watched him speed-walk towards Bast and turned back towards the mountains again.

In town, Maddeson walked like a memory. Weaponless, unnoticed, they returned to the scene of the crime. 

Patrols passed in two's. People went about the quiet business of a night coming.

Perry's was closed. The door was locked. Maddeson didn't try the windows. I was primed if they were tried to reveal Maddeson's ultimate antagonist, HOOD, the groups' employer. I was ready to reveal the face, and a surprising one, I thought. 

But Maddeson didn't try the windows. 

Instead they went to the Misnan gate, slowly, and stood in front of two guards of the Corrhéonic Stand. 

Pedestrian? said a guard.

I'm here to turn myself in, said Maddeson.

For what, Pedestrian?

I was involved. 

In what, Pedestrian?

In what happened over there, at the tavern.

The guards loosened their arms. 

Say again, Pedestrian?

I am one of them. We left town after it happened.

One of who, Pedestrian. 

A long pause.

I am Maddeson Clothchilde, Envoy of Genemene, and I killed a man in that tavern.

And that's where we ended the session. 

The Prep

Hoping this isn't a bother, to switch formats on you. To date I've put prep first and/or incorporated it alongside the play.

However, I've been having a hell of a time writing this particular arc down as a result of that approach. I think it's the desire to overshare every little detail of prep which I'm not sure is all that helpful, if not overcomplicating things.

This has been a difficult set of sessions to get the pitch right. I've done quite a bit of overprep and it's been obvious through the amount of material that made it from my rough draft notebooks to my final draft notebook. 

Which is not very much.

Players started the foray at HQ under the banner of Zugg's desire to piece together fragments of an amnesiatic memory. 

Bear in mind that all forays scheduled leaving HQ should have a direction so players don't wander forever and can return to the pool of available players. We've had other folks asking about scheduling a game, but with five regular players out for multiple sessions in a row, we lose the West Marches approach, that groups can come and go. 

I've had to make rulings on this for myself, which is just that until you return to HQ, you can't dive into another group. With the way that I tend to play, which is very much 'leave space for whatever to happen', and the fact that the players are invested in each interaction, we are where we are.

So we're four sessions from HQ, and the group is splitting up, none headed back to check in. This is in large part because!? DUN DUN DUN: HQ doesn't matter.

The only driving impetus provided from onset was 'make rent', and I reckon with that impetus regularly. 

Zugg Dax even notes: I can't party with someone so concerned with landlords. It was a beautiful in-game moment, but it echoed into my heart. 

I'm not troubled by this overmuch. It's one thing that made this last session so special. Letting players watch the other players move independently and flash-cutting between scenes very much miles from each other is fun for me. I do worry, after similar campaigns years ago, that players will grow tired of being part of a double or even triple feature as is the case now, but as I told them last night, when they return to HQ, they can join another group. Both Zugg and Maddeson who are quite independent souls have sought to be free of the party, and in a lot of ways, letting them see each other play independently and far from each other I think provides deeper context to when or if they are together. They're seeing how the other person acts when confronted expressly with ME, and not with the intricacies of a five-person party, especially a five-person party played only through audio. There are just obvious cues and social language missing from internet play and these issues are the same issues that plagued group hangouts during Covid over Zoom, or any similar experience. People get overtalked; they can't speak without being a little rushed, and there is a self-awareness that emboldens some folks excessively, while pressing others to meekness. 

So: I'm happy, at the end, that everyone's going different ways, even if no one is going back to HQ. As I told them at the end of the session: you're still a group, so I won't schedule you separately. You will watch each other; this is not a punishment. It's an opportunity to get to know each other. I invited every  person in this game to play because I would play with them any time. The fact that they don't get along suggests they haven't seen in each other what I have seen in them. So: we expose that, and if it requires watching a dialogue play out as Maddeson turns themself in or Zugg tries to find companionship in a pilgrim and his son, then let it be so. If it requires following their own lead for Peets, Zahir and Godfrey to realize they like suiting up behind the more dominant aspects in Zugg and Maddeson, so be it. Perhaps they will appreciate each other more. Perhaps they will choose not to play together again. I am here to be everyone's ally in admitting their best selves. We came together to play a game in a Time and manner that is engendering isolation and righteous value sets. Being people as a group is hard. But it is also healthy to do hard things. 

And this is why I don't talk about prep at the end, because I don't talk about prep. I talk about summary and philosophy and sociology. 

Bollocks.

Prepwise, I realized operating in hexes with three major landmarks, that there is a lot of world nearby. I don't necessarily want players to skip anything or not skip anything, but I do find as I've been laying the area around them that I'm eager to integrate nearby landmarks and hexes. My method of doing this has been to create wandering actionables, which as Clane nicely put, are really simply plot hooks. 

For example, players have been roughly traveling north-east from HQ and if the vector continues, we run into C-26 and C-14. As a result I made this shortlist of potential 'agents' traveling to and from these places based on the landmark descriptions Clane and I produced in development:

C-26: 

• bamboo fissure grove
• bamboo harvester

• brakenwold dale
• a fire warden leaving a 3-month stay,
• the opposite,
• tea caravan,
• rinkhal poison collector,
• an assassin who has collected rinkhal poison,

• penat hoi
• a roving mass of animate limb + head searching for a torso,

C-14:

• loathsome line
• an escaped slave who left behind a family,
• an escaped slave not looking back,
• an escaped orc who can't communicate,
• someone who's just found a new wellspring,
• a hilltown sheriff after the Custodial Knight,

• glintfall ravines
• they struck it rich last spring and its year two!,
• goldmen

As exemplar for how this method worked for me, I drew Caln from 'an escaped slave not looking back'. He became a boy whose family had been enslaved and eventually died in the Custodial Knight's camp. 

Caln proved to be a troubled character to play on my end, and my teeth chattered when I did so. He was tender and the characters were kind, but ultimately they didn't have the group regularity or security that made him/me feel sincerely safe, and so despite their kindness (and the less-than-generous offer of letting him wear the cloak of hiding recently looted from the corpse of a What's Due agent), he used a long moment of being ignored to disappear among the sagebrush. 

This loss was felt. One of the characters spent a long forlorn moment after the hillside murder of What's Due agents, to try to call him back but the cloak was a good one, and though I could sense Caln was close, the rolls weren't great and he wasn't convinced.

(But he's still nearby, headed for Bast as described above). 

That said, this has been my habit now each session. Sit down and look at the surrounding environs and say who has a home near here or a job near here or a reason to be going here, whether leaving or staying. I've started to call this small prep moment 'obstacles'. And I try to be bold with this, because yes, I can send lackeys or more merchants or whatever, but really, Corrhéo is steeped with NPCs of note. Powerful people with interesting backstories (to me). If I keep running the players into people whose names I have to make up on the spot, then players are forever going to be making up their own names, metaphorically. They will always be 'people dealing with lackeys' and having to fight to get to powerful entities. The Penitent Oasis is a wandering oasis. Lord Wygmy is a lord. I have such a strong tendency to just add 'Wygmy's guard' rather than Wygmy himself to the list of potential encounters. If I have Teegan Stow, Riverboat Captain as a Big Story in my mind, I instinctively choose to add her second-mate who is on a supply run in the encounter list. This is .. fine? But it's also cowardice. Because Teegan Stow and Lord Wygmy and the Penitent Oasis are capital P People and Places to me, capital E Encounters. They're things that I'm scared to try to describe or act out. And scared means excited, or at least uses the same aspects of my nervous system. And so, in the act of being my own hero. I'm trying, trying, trying, to keep adding at least one or two (or three, Hugh!) Characters With Teeth to my obstacles list when I prep, just so that I know I've got cards that can at least MATCH character power / self-assurance. This allows me to move them, challenge their ideas of what the world is, challenge their ideas of who they are, rather than always letting them write their own narrative of Corrhéo. Because the whole subtext to the place is "the land that knew better than its people", and what are the PCs, if not its people?

I also did develop a small table for randomly picking a landmark using a deck of cards. It was an accident on the development side that I'd just like to play into that we have 52 hexes and there are 52 cards in a standard deck. I just associated landmark numbers with a card each so if someone came to the game setting and wanted to randomize a starting point, they could draw a card and roll a d6 and they'd have a landmark in a jiffy. This of course, as a designer, got me thinking that the cards should serve dual or even triple purpose. They could have details about the landmark on them (with said wandering actionables or keywords or somesuch) and could be arrayed so you could lay them out on a table as a 'current hex and its surrounding hexes' physical map/diagram, but also they could just be a deck of cards, whereon each suit was Ace to King of one of the four major factions of Corrhéo (the Stand, the Fold, What's Due, and the Berrylmen). They could be fortune teller cards. They could be a lot of things. But I love paraphernalia. And this is just asking myself for more artwork, more layout, more knowledge, but, you know, the Kickstarter looms someday and stretch goals are legitimate. And sometimes you have to follow the more ... inspired connections that form out of creative matter.

Last thing I'll mention because this is getting long and unwieldy and I still have to typeset it, is that faction clocks or plot clocks as I've begun to think of them have become a great joy as a DM. 

At the beginning of all of my session preps I've been writing or drawing new 'pies' for any NPC that has walked away from the characters. What is the next major thing that will happen to them without player interference. And I try to make it major. It's happening offscreen, so there's no reason to have it be nuanced. Then at the beginning of prep, I go back through my notebook with all its notes and look for all my little pie charts one after another, and I fill one pie piece in.

The first pie charts are reaching completion now. For instance: in Bero's Boon where the characters started, the harpy egg that was in the trees that they never sought or found has hatched. As it turns out, this will turn Bero's Boon into a damned encampment. Next time the players arrive, the world will have changed there for the blacker. Similarly, a pie chart filled in which Lord Wygmy gained access to his jet vein. In the process, he unlocked a problem: there are things down in that mine he didn't want to deal with. Thus we have Magister Crowley scarpering down the hillside desperate for player attention.

This all happened off-screen, but regular readers know players encountered the harpy many sessions ago. Players encountered Lord Wygmy on their first night! They didn't necessarily choose to deal with either, but they intend to go back to Bero's Boon, and now it won't be the same and I already know why. They didn't choose to deal with Wygmy's earlier mine issue (help him gain access), but they already have some perspective or entanglement with an issue that has come calling quite naturally. Crowley recognizes them, they recognize him. 

Ta da. A weave is formed.

Which is a great joy, as a guy who likes living worlds, moving tapestries.

Session 3 - Playlog - Corrhéo

Mind, come hither. We must speak of the Dread Session 3. 

The Dread Session 3, end of the Trilogy. Dread Session 3 whose notes took me less than half a karate class to turn into graphs. 

Dread Session 3, what Tragedy.

No. I mean: tragedy is overstating it. I just wrote afterwards:

"felt like I couldn't hear the players, what they wanted or were getting at—felt like I just said flat no too many times. Too many anonymous openings to other places. Too little player agency. So many 'I'll just watch' scenes..."

The short sense was it felt like I'd set a bunch of traps that I was too much a coward or too distracted to spring. 

Being an optimist, I have to paint them as a part of the compost, but please understand that at the end of Session 3, I did not feel like I had done my job correctly. I do think that it was a great test run of both my skills as a story guide and of Corrhéo proper, but I will look back on it as a pretty low high water mark. And I think there could be one, a pretty high one up there on the surrounding sandstone, eventually.

But: into the pond. Into the muck.

Our characters left off in Bero's Boon, just adjacent the Muddyhen Pickets. 

TOC - Corrheo Playlog

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"

  

I think that since this felt like such a drubbing of a session, I'll probably end up needing to self-flagellate a fair bit to get over it. As a result I'll just highlight a variety of missteps I think I made from start to finish and then throughout that a story of what happened will undoubtedly arise. 

Foremost: 

I planned to conclude.

Neither is a problem in isolation. It is good to plan. It is good to conclude.

But planning to conclude was predicated on an assumption. The assumption that the players were interested in moving on, getting back to HQ, 'being done', 'over it', etc. 

The truth of this is that sure, maybe they were: but that needed to be admitted as a possibility, not assumed as an absolute. 

The fact of this assumption is fairly obvious from the fact that the only table I generated was a 2d4 Outcomes of if Veel and Huguklah are in the Same Room.

It was actually a fairly nice table. Recall here that our players had staked out the swamp, figured out that this Veel Mulgav character was floating around out there, and then on returning that information to Camp Manager Huguklah, were returned the detail that Veel and Huguklah shared a father and it wasn't pretty.

This all works out cleanly against the secrets I'd rolled up: Veel was supposedly a runaway of sorts who had left a decent career that had been laid out for him and been cursed by his mother as a result, a curse that manifested as his need to sing along with the melancholic tune of the harpies that haunt the swamps. 

The point here however is not how it fit in to the existing storyline, but that I was already planning for the fact that Huguklah and Veel would encounter one another and that I would need a decisive action to take place so that I wasn't playacting between two NPCs while the PCs watched. It's one thing if a captain meets a strange hermit and the two have some intermediate exchange in front of the PCs, but to have two half-brothers with a deep past have an exchange is just asking to put on a one-man show, one of my least favorite traps a DM can set for themselves; that I could set for myself. 

Enter snare, enter foot.

The table was sort of interesting in that I followed some of ms screwhead's advice to make it 'the most something'. Sample entries: Huguklah kills Veel in a single strike; Veel kills Huguklah in a single strike; Veel sets the swamp range ablaze and makes a run for it through the traps; Trollmage Peern appears with a mocking laugh and summons Veel away; Veel's been mauled by a harpy attack and is bleeding out; Veel sneaks behind to camp and makes off with camp's major treasures!

These were all cool and I liked the idea of each of them happening; but lo again if I didn't roll a 6 as probability projected: 'Huguklah issues a bounty and gives 120g upfront'. 

Couldn't have asked for the least interesting of the story ideas I came up with when we got there. 

I'm getting ahead of myself but it brings up another major DM choice that I regret now and plan to assess before future sessions:

I set every option on a probability table rather than just picking the most interesting circumstance.

Let's ignore now that I was railroading my players towards an eventual encounter between the two lead NPCs and just say that's fine, we've gone over it.

There still was no reason to make the potential circumstances of that railroading more or less probable, outside of a bizarre desire to keep a world 'more realistic', which is not what excites the mind. 

Probability tables like this 2d4 table have been very thrilling for me to write because they are non-linear. I write them from the center of the table (things that come to mind first) out to more rare things or things that take my mind longer to get to, things that as a DM scare me a little bit—what if a God did show up? That would be a wild improbability but to have it as a possibility thrills the part of me that's playing with chance... 

However practical that is from a development standpoint, it doesn't acknowledge what I was so proud of, so excited about from last Session which is: put myself in a corner and getting myself out. 

At the end of the day, if I'd run a finger down the list of options for what happens when Players + Huguklah enter scene with Veel and said what here is the MOST of these?.. any of the options besides the most common would have been more interesting. Sure, they would have been less realistic given the fact that the players had alerted Veel to their presence, to the fact that he was being hunted or scouted, but rolling one of these 'less realistic / more rare circumstances' would then make it imperative on me to understand / explain / rationalize how it still made sense.

This would have made me, DM, play harder. 

So with this poor kindling in mind, I acknowledge that I am staring at my tables now in retrospect thinking: okay, probability when probability is called for, brainstorm when brainstorm is called for. It is fine to brainstorm with probability, but when loosed to the wild of the game table, LET IT GO and pick the most interesting thing as it relates to the characters' current circumstance.

As I go to turn this small series into a module for practice, I will do some conversion.

I think that's all I want to talk about Prep, because I quite earnestly did very little and rolled into the Session on the tailcoat of the previous. Players hadn't moved, Maddeson's player was coming back. 

Let's get to how it played out.

Session Play

Like I said, Maddeson was back. You'll summon to your memory how interesting it was last session that characters had spent as much time caring for their AFK Comrade as they had investigating the scene about them. This said something about their investment, you'll recall.

However: huge disconnect! 

If a player has been treated as an object, they will never match how they have been treated with their play.

Maddeson should not have been 'allowed' to come back. The moment they became an object in the other players' minds was the moment they could no longer properly inhabit their own body. Everyone else was concerned; this person didn't know how to play into that. 

They walked back into Maddeson, Clothchilde of Genemene and essentially said, on prompting: well, I feel fairly ill so I imagine I would lay down again.

Oy, talk about a dud, eh? Everyone else has been scrambling to find herbs, inner powers, whatever they can to cure this sad character's doomy illness, and it's 'well I think I'll keep napping'. 

This, as the remainder of the group are tucking in behind Huguklah to go square off against the Big Mystery...

...I'll just take a nap.

Now: (I told you this would be riddled with self-flagellation) I take 3/4 responsibility for this causing issues. One character starting a session with well I just can't be bothered to move is like, THE obstacle a DM must confront with their wickedest tools. If characters wish to move, the impulse is to set things in their way to move around, move through, destroy, step over, leap over, whatever. GET PAST. 

But to the character who won't move, who can't be bothered, it is time to bother. The impulse must be 'make this character move'. And instead, I left Maddeson in their tent. I didn't send any stinging insects, I didn't ramp up the fever, I didn't put mysterious sounds in the swamp around them. 

My mistake.

But everyone else followed Huguklah into the swamp. 

DAMNIT. Again: a mistake. The players followed Huguklah. 

Suddenly I had a Company of four following an NPC to confront an NPC who most assuredly had more to say to his half-brother than he did to them. We whizzed through the swamp, collecting the Father Jen Mado too. Everyone met up at the black pond. Zugg the Non-Paladin-Paladin found a hotstring in the dog's hut because I rolled it as treasure. Now I'm adding treasure where there wasn't treasure? I'm being... generous. 

Ohboi.

Where are my boundaries?

I roll on the encounter chart: harpy song from the south.

Okay. Fewf. Slow down, Hugh.

Recall that in Session 2 we'd added the Dusksong Passage onto the Muddyhen Pickets as a secondary adventure site. Veel Mulgav's hunter's blind would share an entrance/exit with the Passage, wherein the harpy would be mounted as a static encounter. 

So harpy song is cool. Harpy song is cool because Veel and the harpy have become more and more intertwined the longer this development has gone on. Veel has to sing with the harpy, it's his curse. 

So now, even though all the players are taking gravewax from Zahir the Half-Orc Priest to protect themselves from what seem quite charming albeit melancholic harmonies from the south, those who are a bit braver are hearing Veel's bass notes mix in to the song. 

The Company heads south. 

So long ago now, in Session 1, Peets the Rather Young Goblin and Zahir Orc Priest were a turn away from the Hunter's Blind node. Now were headed straight there. I'm hardly describing anything which is bad for business: again; suspense low, DM is towing players where they need to go. Uck.

And when we get there, it's quite lovely, honestly. Cinematic, says Zugg, out of character. The harpy is crooning down to Veel who's high up on a swamp rise dismantling his hunter's blind. She's not a typical harpy, more crow-serpent than woman-crow or woman-bird. A few aspects are human. It's tranquil even, and that's obvious: everyone sits from a far distance and just watches for awhile. The island / rise is something like a wizard's hat in shape with an easy approach and vague exits are described in many directions. 

Haguklah stays still. Watches. The song sort-of finishes. The harpy flies off. 

I gave up my encounter for no good reason except time had passed without engagement.

Okay, sure: was it supposed to be an encounter with Veel to complete the adventure?

No: it wasn't supposed to be anything.

Remember Maddeson is still sick in their tent. We're halfway through a 3hr session and their player hasn't said a word. Remember the idea is to spur if still. My players are all watching this engagement like, sure, boy is using some beautiful words and descriptions, but ultimately the world is not trying to engage with them. I am not trying to engage with them. I'm taking pretty toys and putting them in various postures in front of them and talking to myself. 

I think looking back at my 2d4 'what could happen when Huguklah hits the hunter's blind' probability thing, I should've just run Veel around back to camp. He's not even here in the blind. He's back there with Maddeson, cleaning house, stealing the hundred-some pelts that've been collected. He's burning the camp. Meanwhile, players find the harpy. Now her song gets pointed at them and one of them is seduced. Now everyone's involved and everyone's trying to solve problems. That's what I wish I'd done.

But that didn't happen. Instead Huguklah had to advance (again), call out to his half-brother in a loud voice that alerted the man. Sent him running. Of course the group responded reasonably: they were primed for this. But Veel wasn't a character designed for a 1v6. He's a swamp ranger. He uses traps, camouflage. He takes a Zugg shoulder to the chest. Gets wrapped in a grapple hook. Yields. The combat's over in two turns that don't even feel like turns.

Proceed with me now: characters step off to let Huguklah talk it out with his half-brother; I enter a sort of expository trance explaining everything without dialogue until eventually Veel is melting away into the forest, released by a kind-hearted older brother who explains everything to everyone—that Veel is a bit odd and eco-conscious and lost and that forgiveness is a good thing—and here's a small sac of coin for your troubles. 

Oof, friend. It was an anti-climax to beat! My god. 

I mean, recall, permutations for this scenario included Veel actually being a doppleganger. Well now that would've been interesting eh? A half-brother acting oddly?

Blarg. It was a bit like those times someone picks on you and an hour later you've got about fifteen gorgeous, vicious, poison-drenched things that you could've said in the moment but didn't.

And as Old Friend Vonnegut said so often: so it goes.

Well, players evaporated from scene, scuttling back to HQ with Maddeson in tow and made decisions that I won't bore you with about finally settling in. Zugg B-D made promises to the Mado Family to return in a couple weeks and help with their ant problem at Wilted Hollow. The team tracked down a bit of gilfern salve at A. Respectable's manor and fixed up Maddeson's buboes, even though Maddeson's player had stepped out early (again, probably a result of the zero-actual-play they did). 

Just a damn gold mine of things to avoid doing in the future and I appreciate you sitting through this painful experience. 

The long and short remains: 

• Players lead. Find a way to make players lead.
• If someone is still, try make them move. If someone is moving, try to make them stop.
• Don't let the principles of probability overwhelm the principle of interest.
• Don't be too hard on yourself. 

Players have already signed up for another session. They are aiming to scout the way to the Brunswick Farm Collect in the north near the Grey Misnan. They want to get into a scrape along the way. They want the world to have teeth. They feel like they're getting fat with my generosity.

Okay. 

I hear that.

I will grow some teeth.

Since this has mostly been a Lambast of Self, I'll offer a few goods that came of it:

The Kite Hunter — older than dogs—looks like one but for a thin bristle under-coat which is hard to avoid in a grapple, taking dmg that would kill a hawk, designed to protect against avian attack. Nocturnal. Tremendous eyes and wide deep ears. Only settles when it sleeps. Levitates enough to never leave trace except in bedding.

Ring of the Darrow Family Estate—can't wear it for long—pressing the embedded polished jet to a single subject emits a chill, and eventual freeze. Huguklah uses it to freeze pelts for future transport. The Darrow Family use them to freeze corpses for future animation.

A HIDDEN OCEAN JETTY —adding this to 'experiences that can be had along the Silt Salt Coast'. Clane and I have not produced landmarks yet on the sea, but this is where Veel would've bolted if I'd given him more capacity. It's where he was headed before he took that shoulder to the chest.

The Trollmage Peern—this character and their respective Boghouse still need writing; let's say in a blogpost or two. I'll mark it with a small key for myself so I know I've got work to do. How about a yellow highlight for 'things Hugh's gotta take a turn on the dance floor with'. The Trollmage is one of a kind and only referenced offhand in the Madame's Wayhouse landmark. Evidently they're quite mischevious and filthy rich with money they don't know how to use properly.

Brewing Secrets

 

I don't like teaching easy classes. I teach ESL for immigrants at the local college at night. Mostly immigrants. Some au pairs. 'Travelers'.

Most folks don't have full control of their ABC's. But they're adults. They're 20 - 60. They've got big big brains and cool ideas. Limited power of expression in one country but in their own world, whatever private world they have, undoubtedly 'forces'. 

I don't like easy classes so I don't give easy assignments:

Students developed together the 'fifteen essential elements of a town or settlement'. Then they each had to draw the town on a nice 11x17" map grid I designed for them and are now populating the map with fifteen people.

You can already see how I'm crowdsourcing my community work for more D&D material, but the crime continues.

These people have relationships to three other people. There can no duplicates. Only one brother, only one 'client of'. If Maria is listed as Juan's sister, Juan cannot be listed as Maria's brother, even though he is. 

Then, every character needs to have a secret.

Just because, right? Just because—maybe—everyone has a secret.

I don't teach easy classes but it doesn't mean I'm cruel. I made some tables for secret sewing; for some percolator heat. I want that cask to bubble over with creative foam, baby. I need good material. I'm like an idea succubus.

So here's the tables. Post if you use them, I'd love to read your 'sample secret' wherever, whenever. Shyness doesn't become you.

4d20 Secret Percolator

4d20 Secret Percolator B&Wish.

SESSION 2 - Playlog - Corrhéo

Yes, again, we'll get into the details but:

Should I assume that you're going to read S1 Playlog and just drop you right into the mix and medley, or should I give some sort of backdrop?

Backdrop: Corrhéo is a country and a 52-hex project put together by myself and Clane that I am playtesting via a West Marches campaign over Discord with interested parties that include friends, family, and maybe you. 

The setting. Clane put it yesterday:

I didnt think we could pull off pod-capsule launching catapults, berrylmen balloonists and steampunk electric lords in the same world as Lovecraftian obsidian knights, wasteland prophets and casual undead liches & necromancers but it works

Here's a running Table of Contents, and then I'll drop in on Prep and Play of Session 2.

1. Working Player's Survey of Corrhéo
2. Session 1 - Corrhéo - West Marches - "To Bero's Boon"
   

Zeunt!

Wanting that exclamation to be a little more section-breaky than it is. 

Zeunt!

Alright. Session 2, scheduled 3-4 weeks after the first. 

All of my intentions were to have players leave HQ at the beginning of a session and return by the end of a session so that they could then post details about what they saw and experienced in the wild for other players to base their own decisions off where to go next. 

All plans laid to rest. All plans collapse, at best.

This team—

Maddeson, Clothchilde and Envoy of Genemene; 

Zugg Brunswick-Dax, adopted of the Brunswick farm collect; 

Taamog Peets, a rather young goblin;

Godfrey, a human fighter with long black greasy hair; &

Zahir, a tall, scrawny, half-orc priest

—never made it back to HQ.

And alas—

Maddeson, Clothchilde and Envoy of Genemene;  

—could not make scheduling work for them.

So I consulted with Maddeson a week or so post-session when it was clear that the group likely needed to start from where they were in the swamp rather than return to HQ.

Maddeson had been ... dainty regarding swamplife? Very opposed to Huguklah's various muck wisdoms (cover yourself in slime, mostly) to combat the rich ecosystem of insects. Maddeson had been ... a bit high on their horse. 

I wasn't keen to punish Maddeson's player for living life so figured since they'd admitted one of their major character motivations as take advantage of my time in Corrheo to find new herbs, and knowledge in herbalism, I would put forward: 'berry blight'— a blotchy fever that rocks the body with a wracking fever—buboes in the neck, armpit and groin. -3 to CON until reversed. 

Fix is gilfern salve.

The idea was to weave some landmark knowledge I'd recently provided Zugg Brunswick-Dax, adopted of the Brunswick farm collect, for his backstory.

C-03-03 Misnan Keep

 

or The Grey Misnan if preferred: a Corrhéonic outpost of mudworks and stove-edge fencing. Patrols are active, with two Reams actively patrolling, two resting, and two attending to keeply duties—repair, hunt, fortify.

The waist-high wall of yeglite is like a long cemetary. Interwoven, not solid, but built, planted, at intervals, to slow the thunderous approach of braeburn steeds which riders from the hills and mountains north of Corrhéo ride.

The land has been quiet though in recent years, so the Stand have become lax in routine. Suggestions that there is a massing to the north flood the mouths of those prone to believe the world a dangerous place. Others, the more bucolic-minded, are willing to believe in frontier peace—some have begun to even plant gardens, to retire or marry—the proliferation of gilfern in tandem with the shrubland stone wall has brought croppers and dryers and dyers and peddlers.

The grass here is tall and the hills golden.

So ZBD knows where gilfern is (a good ways away by map's reckoning), Maddeson of Genemene is sick with fever & buboes (thank you forever, Connie Willis, for buboes), and when M of G wakes up, the two can connect the pieces and have a new destination in mind. 

The plan anyway. 

Collapsing at best.

Let's Talk About Session Prep

I started same as last session: drawing a set of seven rinky-dink hexes on my paper. Checked the surroundings. 

And the surroundings provide further net for keeping PCs within a hex range anyway.

Much reduced from Session 1, I really only had to prep my knowledge of C-17 or C-14 as Session 1 gave me C-10 and C-11 (HQ). 

And in reading them, I'd clearly forgotten how nasty and strange Silt Coast hex landmarks were. The Tooth Taker... God. Silt fleas and bristle flies. I suspect players will want to stay in the green lands over time, but we'll see. The right fruit draws the tenderest eyes. 

Players are in Bero's Boon, with access to the Muddyhen Pickets, a six-node adventure site. C-15-01, neck-deep in night-time.

They'd admitted intentions to both stake-out the snipper of snares and also gather information from the NPCs they had access to: Huguklah and the Mado Family. 

Maddeson of Buboes was supposed to be on stake-out with Godfrey the Greasy-Haired. 

I knew Veel was in the swamp cutting snares. I had a d6 chart of his motivations, unrolled. I was excited for players to use torches. You'll remember Taamog Peets, Rather Young Goblin had spotted harpy's nests to the south. I had a harpy in mind. Black seduction of some kind? 

I made my list of Essentials:

• The Mado's
• Huguklah
• Coypu & otters
• Dusksong Passage
• Veel Mulgav
• Clinchin Fold middlemen
• Berry blight

The Mado Family

So we've got a collection of potential 'fellow trappers' in the swamp here at Bero's Boon. 

The Mado Family was an improv based on 'family who've lost their cattle', an encounter drawn last session from an anecnote in Clane's Wilted Hollow landmark:

C-10-03 - Wilted Hollow 

The Wilted Hollow is situated on the western edge of the vast silt-salt desert, where the winds from the desert have transformed an ancient forest into a petrified landscape. The terrain is characterized by blue-grey, barkless trees standing motionless in cracked, salt-encrusted clay. Delicate layers of silt are constantly blown in from the sea, coating everything with gritty dust. 

Deeper: Once a thriving forest, the Wilted Hollow has long since turned to stone. The trees, preserved by time and salt, form a petrified woodland. Over the centuries, the roots of these trees have created natural cavities and chambers beneath the surface, some large enough to be used as tombs. Great Lords of the Clinchin Fold know the naturally dry, stable conditions and have used these chambers for torpor tombs, where ideal conditions should indefinitely preserve their bodies and wealth. 

The first and most infamous burial site is the Tomb of the Lordless, a crypt hidden deep beneath the petrified roots of one of the giant trees. While the tomb has remained untouched for centuries, over the years, rumors of treasure and lost riches have drawn the attention of adventurers, robbers, and the curious to the Hollow.  

The Wilted Hollow’s dry, cracked terrain makes travel difficult. The silt and salt from the desert cause frequent dust storms, which can obscure vision and treacherous navigation. Additionally, the root chambers, while stable, are often hidden beneath layers of silt and clay, making them hard to locate. Some chambers have become unstable over the years and may collapse if disturbed. The Hollow is also subject to persistent exposure to extreme temperatures, with scorching heat during the day and cold at night. Adventurers should be prepared for the harsh conditions before venturing into the area. 

Recently, the Wilted Hollow has become a concern for the nearby villages. Strange animal tracks have been discovered near the Hollow’s edge, suggesting recent activity despite its reputation as a desolate place. Villagers have reported hearing sounds from the wind and the unsettling noise of shifting stones at night. Though the Hollow is largely avoided, these signs suggest that someone—or something—is digging among the petrified trees. Colossal moles have begun expanding their tunnels to the Hollows, opportunistic feeders feasting on helpless dreamers within the tombs. 

Additionally, several livestock have gone missing from nearby farms, leading some to believe that more is concealed than just old graves. Anxious lords will pay well for answers.

I made the Mados Dar sheep farmers. We have a random beast encounter called 'very aggressive sheep'. I'm assuming the two are the same.

Sheep farmers who lost their flock are now in the swamp trapping otter to make ends meet. A family of four (no names yet). 

They had to be farming somewhere though, right, in the Wilted Hollow landmark? 'Nearby farms'. 

We haven't written any villages. We haven't written any farms... 

So I wrote 'multiple villages?' and underlined it. Then I named them.

Carmaad.

Then Lynn.

Then Tunke.

Okay three villages.

I made another Bite-Sized Dungeon. (Marcia B, when will I pay off this debt?). It worked for the Pickets... Maybe I could just imagine the villages as sites, rather than things that needed whole-ass maps. 

Clane writes that the petrified forest is encroaching on the grasslands. The trees are stoney? Life must be tough there...

I place the villages in a row. After that, all is random. My entrance pops up down at the Hollow of Roots which is unexpected. I typically picture walking into adventure village-first. The Tomb of the Lordless is trapped. There's a treasure in the Abandoned Village, Overtaken by Sand and Stone), and both of my encounters roll in the villages themselves. 

Okay, I'm thinking: Carmaad is where I already had the Mado's farm pegged... who would they encounter...

I stop. I don't need to think who they would encounter. I'll just roll for it. That's why we made all these damn tables!

Roll. Ant army, eating.

Oof. So this is how the Mado's lost their sheep.

Roll for Tunke's encounter. Raki stickbug making territorial display. We don't have beast statblocks or descriptions written. Half the time our stuff is just 'sounds cool I'll write it someday'. 

It's someday.

I don't roll a number. I picture a forest of Raki stickbugs, petrified brown and huge. I go read about stickbugs for awhile: they curl up like scorpions to look strong and dangerous; they flash red hidden wing flaps vibrantly; worst case, they're spiny and grapple with those long legs. Fake ents. 

They'd hate to hear that. Sorry Raki stickbug. 

They've come out of the petrified trees and are shaking territorially. Maybe a hard breeze through bamboo. But with click noises. What, are they running their breath through their tiny mouths? Cicada, maybe? Like cicada plus the percussive clack of a stick on wood?

Who are they demonstrating to? NPCs of course. And NPCs with a reason to stay and take the territory right? Petrified wood, beautiful stuff. How about a stonecutter: Eyork Cool and his partner Kel. The treasure for the node becomes friendship with whoever the PCs help. Probably a petrified wood necklace either way...

The town of Lynn is empty so I choose it as my 'special interactable place that doesn't hurt but is actually scenery'. In this case it's the locked house with the raving lunatic inside repeating I AM LORD LOSS to exhaustion. 

Maybe I AM LORDLESS is the verbal password to enter the Tomb of the Lordless in node 5. Too tough?Might be too complicated. But I also don't have and won't have the prep done for the Tomb of the Lordless by game-time, so I'd rather they not go in quite yet. 

Woof! We are deep in prep, friends. Take a break. We haven't even hit harpies yet.

2

Huguklah 

didn't need much love. He'd been fairly fleshed out in the improv of Session 1, but I did add him a secret. I haven't transmogrified my How To Seed a Secret tables into something nice looking but I did type them up.

I'll deep dive on the table in an upcoming post but suffice to say it was 3 columns when I upgraded Huguklah's character background with a little spice, and now rather than a happy-go-lucky Happy Man in the Swamp With a Problem, he's also guilty about his passion for magic with such a luddite, common-sense family.

Coypu & otters:

 

These were what could be trapped and hunted. I just realized I hadn't made them prominent in the first session and had wanted, if the characters were inclined, for them to be able to make enough off of snaring and hunting to pay rent (I think they owe 150g, at 3g a pelt?).

I opted to just say there would be, with any reasonable attack or grab, 1d6 catchable in any of the passing rooms, and that they'd be very prevalent in the dark.

Then 

Dusksong Passage

Reminder, a highlight from Session 1 when Peets, Young Goblin, climbed a tree, got an encounter roll, 2 dusksong harpies. I opted to nest them far away because I think they'd kill him and his friends. 

He came in obsessed with the nests as I thought he might.

Dusksong Passage was a way of 

1) finishing Clane and I's commitment to 3 landmarks per hex

2) trying out a 'Bite-Sized Dungeon Attached to Another Bite-Sized Dungeon' and

3) making sense of the harpy-nest-encounter-that-was-not-an-encounter

As such, I followed the usual perscription on Bite-Sizers:

Got the same layout as I did for the Session 1 in Bero's Boon. Began to immediately worry: is this where dice-rolling for layouts goes wrong? 

No. Entrance got rolled right in the middle, in 4. Occupied hex also got rolled at 4 (unkeyed unfortunately I realize now) and in 3, up in the upper right. 

Well: plan had been a secret entrance found in Bero's Boon when our heroes discover Veel Mulgav's hideout, his 'hunter's blind'. But now that the space was occupied as well...

I took a page out of Johnn Four's Five-Room Dungeon which Clane has been considering in the dev room: the first room is a guardian of some kind.

Hadn't thought of that honestly; I tend to prefer deep lures. But I put the harpy in at 4 again. Sure. You've made it to the entrance to the Passage. She's the most powerful creature there. She'd be there to greet you. This is her lair (for now). 

Then of course there's two nests, spotted by Our Goblin Peets. I put them in 6. I'm prone as result of the nests to begin thinking of taller trees, and also prone to begin wanting any non-occupied rooms to still provide more world. Given Peet's tree-climbing attitude (and his desire to keep avoiding waterlogged boots), the view from 5 would likely give our Company some more landmark knowledge elsewhere. Not a treasure per se, but a broader scope. So a peek there if they take it, into the rather nasty C-17.

The treasure's in the nest. Or the nest is treasure: like crows collecting silvery things, I want a big old pot of coin and gleam up there high up. The real treasure is the egg, of course. Every Poke-catcher's heart is easily poked with an egg no matter how wrecked the beast that drops it. And we'll complicate emtions with a decomposing second harpy in the nest too, which probably got killed by the first. (But who knows: might actually d6 a 'why is there a second dead harpy in the nest or nearby tree' table later. Permutations are Queen!). 

North west in 1 & 2, I rolled trap, I'm setting the Geas there, a long buried colossus of a ship whose prow still points out, filled to the neck with decomposing matter. Time to start sewing in the science-fantasy.

It still has a special binding presence, so that oaths made thereon are reinforced. I'm not sure who'd be making oaths this deep in the Dusksong, but what's important is that the capacity is there and it's palpable so players might be silly and decide to make an oath. Then I'll be in a corner again and have to explain something wonderous that I don't even quite understand.

Right, a trap. I'll gas trap 4, in case anyone gets to tinkering with the strange 'tiki' torch like cannisters-on-a-pole which stick out from the swamp at hard angles. Not quite sure why they'd be stuffed with gas... but... I don't think it deserves a d6 tabbble. Okay fine. d6 table of why is there gas in the pressure cannisters that stick out of the Geas's main deck? later.

And stirges, in 3, because it's occupied, because I rolled them. Territorial display also! Buzzzzzz. And with a treasure? Well again, Arnold K says no coins and gives me an easy d6 table to avoid them as treasure:

...remember that treasure doesn't need to be treasure.  It can be:

• Shiny shit, such as boring ol' coins, or the jewelled brassiere of the zombie queen.
• Knowledge, such as where to find more treasure, or information you can use to blackmail the king.  Or even a sage, who can answer a single question honestly.
• Friendship, such as an amorous purple worm that follows you around and protects you when it's hungry and a little bored.  Occasionally, it leaves egg sacs laying around for you to fertilize (and it will get angry if you don't sit on them for at least an hour).
• Trade Goods, like a wagon full of tea (worth 10,000gp).  When I give out large parcels of trade goods as treasure, I give half of the XP now, and the other half of the XP when it's sold off.  (I just really like the idea of a mercantile campaign.)
• Territorial, like a tower the players can claim as their own, or an apartment in the nice party of the city (and the chances of being stabbed in your sleep are dramatically reduced).
• Useful adventuring shit, like a magic sword, scroll of blot out the sun, or a parachute.

I roll. 4. Trade goods. A nest made of fragrant patch moss & useful salt vine by the pound. Nice.

I think a landmark writing session is in order so that I have a more postable, palpating thing than this little six-node: what's the Geas, what's the power, etc. That artifact is what feels most potent about the space. 

Harpies, while fun, are simply an encounter roll away from being elsewhere, back in two blog posts with that.

Veel Mulgav

Shorthand notes: I gave Veel a secret too. Sure, he's out there cutting snares. I still haven't rolled on his d6 motivations. It'll come when they find him so I'm in the tightest corner I can talk my way out of. But I do want a bigger secret:

Ah, rolls prove that he has a guilt about career and family and it shows up in deep sadness / melancholy. Or song, in this case. I wager Veel left a career in Drek's Landing, a curse his mother sent him away with. She said something like your father wore his bones to the knees so you could have this and if you walk away from it, a ghost in your thoughts it'll be. 

She was no pirate. She was the wife of a printer or something, but Veel felt it like she was some sphinx of the sea. Now he's in the swamp, and cursed on nights when the harpy sings, to feel the echo of her song of loneliness in his own. He's easily located as a result, if that should happen. (On the encounter chart, for instance).

Last Thing, Bonus Thing

I went to roll that second encounter for the Dusksong Corridor, the stirges. 

I realized then and there that I'd sort of fucked up. 

We based so much of our encounter charting off of Hurst's Hot Springs Island. You'll remember that now. The thing that HSI did very well, among other things, was nest tables. The encounter chart is a 3d6 chart with 4 entries: (1) Probability of Encounter Type (2) Encounter Itself (3) Encounter Quantity and (4) Encounter Motivation. 

Well scramble back a post or two and find out that in my haste to flesh out encounters, I only included the final three. 

This meant that every encounter was a Beast encounter. 

Damnit. 

Well: we have 3 encounter types, as Hurst and Co. did. His were... Intelligent, Beast, and Elemental I believe. Ours matched, but our Elementals are a group called the Popolos (or the Populace?—dunno, made the word up; they are essentially 'the people before these people' and call themselves the Popolos).

Regardless: I needed to double back but a lot of our landmarks have different qualities to them—some of little access to the underearth; some are cities; some are ruins; some are great big fields of grass. Each is going to have a slightly different variation of possibility of encountering different groups. 

Now, I'd already gone through and separated out our factions into 'types of terrain they'd be in'—the Clinchin Fold gravitate towards dusty, hot, lonely places; the berrylmen love their muck and bog. 

And as I look at it now, I did include Popolos in here (see 'Alien'), but I'll adjust that, because this was the big work of Session 2: I made this d6 based chart that is applicable to individual landmarks, sorted by a gut 'type'. 

Decide on what 'variety' of landmark it is (maybe Bero's Boon is 'an outpost', roll a d6, you should get a 'type of encounter'; head to the encounter chart appropriate; roll as usual. 

Key would look like 'B is for Beast', 'F is for Faction', 'P is for Popolos', or in a final version, will likely be Intelligent, Beast, and Alien; though in our case 'Intelligent' is simply for 'groups with knowable motivations'. Not to get too finicky with definitions but there's plenty of intelligence among the beasts and plenty of motivations among the alien. 

Regardless, table made. Excitement had.

Enough prep, let's play please

Play. I was late. I got my East Coast mixed with my Mountain time. I got a note, 'Present' from Zahir. I was walking out to pull rocks out of the pond in the corner of the field.

5 minutes, I say, meaning ten.

Rush back, plug in. Sup guys.

Everyone's expectant. Quiet. Cool: I return us through last time's happenings to oh boy: stakeout is a bit sunk: Maddeson of Genemene has berry blight.

We all know this. I figure they know this as a way to pass the character through an absence of player. But nay. 

Two of us should stay and protect Maddeson. (Maddeson coughs from the tent). Two should continue the stakeout.

This from Zugg of the Farm Collect.

He and Zahir the Half Orc Priest will stay. Godfrey the Greasy Haired and Peets, YG, off you go.

Torch, no torch, torch, no torch. Peets and Godfrey opt for torch for now (tis but 8 milord) and wend their way into the swamp. 

I bypass a node to keep them walking. I noticed it in Session 1, that the empty space of Node 1 (sedge corridor) really only provided pause when written as 'decision point'. In this case though, even though I knew it was empty, I still talked them through it and it gave me time to narrate some sensory stuff. Get the swamp deeper into night that way. Improv, but reminds me to trust that all is there for a reason, or at least serves a purpose.

They stake out. Right beside the black pond. (Still a treasure in there). Peets the Goblin of course up a tree. Greasy Godfrey at its base. Gutter the torch.

Must teach a class. Back in a bit.

3

Back in camp, though he can't respond, Maddeson is being nurtured. Zugg Who Wishes to Be Paladin Though There Are None in Shadowdark has requested an audience with the sufferer of Berry Blight. He does a pretty comprehensive ritual description involving a pair of copper-coated mountain lion fangs and specific pressures—like a reiki ritual or somesuch—and I'm entirely won over. He's trying to ritualize lay on hands which he's snuck onto his character sheet somehow and I'm all for it, but I'm also a little bit of a rules kid, so I can't totally give it to him. 

Berry blight saps CON. Enough to penalize leveling up with it. To date, I had not imagined berry blight getting worse, but all the characters are imagining it will, so I'm along for the ride. After all, the Genemenian isn't responding (as I think he's traveling the East Coast or something).

So Zugg the Non Paladin gets CHILLED. -3 CON but Maddeson stabilizes. (Still has buboes, sorry Madd). 

Anytime a character goes to great length to cast a spell they're unsure of, or a 'blood gift' as Zugg prefers to think of it, I'm never going to 'duds' them. No one needs that embarassment.

Zahir falls in with Huguklah and starts chatting the Rot which is pervasive in Corrheo, and gets her own herbal info on how to fix the kid in the tent. 

Meanwhile in the swamp, the Stakeout Team is proper staked out. 

The harpy (encounter roll) flies overhead singing sweet song, melody pure and sweet. She heads south. Described as 'an elongated crow, as much serpent as bird'. 

Before the night's over, Huguklah reveals she's a harpy but in this moment and for another hour, the Stakeout Team is pretty obsessed. 

Back at camp, Zugg is integrating with the Mado's. We get the story about the ants that ate their sheep. Zahir is drawn into it. Huguklah starts drinking some black beverage no one else wants any part of and most of the work is cleaning boots and trying to make friends with people who aren't too happy about their plot of land.

In the swamp, otters are getting caught up in snares, exhaustion rolls are met with applause, and old Veel Mulgav skates by like a swamp king. 

We do not pursue, says Godfrey, like a soldier.

Characters do not pursue, though Peets the Rather Young Goblin reveals very shaky, young tendencies to start talking just as antagonist enters the scene of the stakeout. Thank goodness for some decent rolls. 

Mulgav's on alert though, I recognize. This ain't his usual swamp foray.

Meanwhile in camp, it's all about berry blight. We're trying to save Maddeson, we're trying to learn about how to salve Maddeson, we're concerned about the boys in the swamp. Everyone's going to bed. Is everyone going to bed? Yes, everyone but you are going to bed. Do you want to go to bed?

I feel a certain unease, says Zugg.

I'm checking on Maddeson again, says Zahir.

Veel Mulgav returns. 

The exhaustion rolls are tougher this time—we're four hours in the black and wet—and Godfrey's Greasy Eyes give out. He knows it too. 

Peets senses him going down and does what Rather Young Goblins do: drops down the tree and starts asking him what they should do now that the antagonist is 60ft away and they're on stake-out. 

Welp, I'm rolling d20's behind the computer screen every sentence that comes out Peet's mouth and by the third, a 20 hits. Yes, you've been noticed because yes, you dropped ten feet into muckwater in the middle of the night and started trying to make a plan with a guy who fell asleep on watch. And yes, there's a dog, too, this time, and it's barking.

Up wakes Godfrey, up goes a torch, twang goes a crossbow from Mulgav right into and through Peet's Young Shoulder but Godfrey's got a shield up and Peets is firing back from over it— — he's aiming at the man the man the man, but realizes he'd rather pop the dog (and I can hear the player take a breath at his own decision because it's a small white dog and its feet aren't going to down under the water; it's a levitating white dog, a kite hunter, I say.)

Misses. (Woof, because, dead dog otherwise, no hp). 

And away goes the swamp king into the night. Everybody breathing hard. 

Meanwhile in camp, the 'something's up' duck whistle Peets blows gets heard. Zahir the Half Orc is primed (and out of conversation points) and runs into the swamp.

Zugg is in full character. He will defend Maddeson the Unconscious. Stays.

All return, carrying two otter that Peets the Young Goblin keeps a cool head on and silences in their snares. 

A debrief occurs. 

What happened out there?

Godfrey reports
- a flying woman w/ beautiful song
- a man who moved like a crab in the swamp
- a levitating dog

Wow. They all say, and choose to sleep for a few hours.

The Mado's serve coffee before they head into the swamp for a day's trapping. Pretty unaware. Probably no one told them what was happening last night at the stake-out. I'm scrambling to figure out how interested Huguklah is in what the team has come up with; how pushy. Real time in my night is dribbling out the glass and I wonder if the PCs will pursue. I wonder: will I have time to let them.

I opt to let players decide. No HP recovered for Peets Bolt-in-Shoulder. Some CON loss again for Maddeson the Berryful. That point lost is returned to Our Zugg. Everyone's thinking maybe we should gtf out of the swamp for his sake. 

I see no reason to interfere. It would suit me. Time is running out. 

Zugg convinces the group to split and go out again. 

Peets and I will go investigate the homestead mentioned in Session 1. Peets will pretend to be a child and I will be his keeper. You two have fine rapport with Haguklah, perhaps you can drum up some information.

There was no homestead. I described a node as homelike, as it was a mangrove cluster rich in coypu and otter dens. It was a peaceful space.

Fine. I will draw in a building there so that he's not totally wrong. Bero's old hut, sagging and decrepit and now more like a shed infested with cats, but the cats are big fat coypu moms.

Faux-Paladin Zugg and Peets YG get there and have a Miyazaki / forest spirit moment among the mangrove weave. Peets finds the a quick treasure in wall-mounted black box because... no treasure so far: roll d100 on our Trinkets and Baubles and gets!

a saltglass lens.

He immediately set it to his eye, of course, to look over and see Zugg find the hidden doghouse, vacant now, but wherein sleeps the kite hunter.

Meanwhile in camp, Huguklah hear's about the dog simultaneously. Knows what it means. 

Veel Mulgav, he says, knowingly. 

And then I rolled on the d6 Veel Mulgav motivation chart from S1.

'Huguklah and Veel share a father, and it isn't pretty'.

I end the session as quick as I can.

Zugg sends me this by text shortly:

Post Game Thoughts

• I think that the ultimate fun of being a DM is pinning yourself in a corner and needing to explain your way out of it. I think that's what I find to be the way I play along with everyone else. Waiting somehow despite my desire to control, to commit, until the very last moment.
• It felt at first like I overprepped for sure. Two six-node Bite Sizers that I didn't even touch? But, this was four hours work? And their existence made conversation much more manageable—the discussion with the Mado's seemed to catch hooks as they explained they hadn't been back to their farm in weeks. And the harpy overhead did the same, elsewhere in the swamp.
  
• I did fall back on Justin Alexander's (or whoever he got it from's) 'faction clocks', which I'm treating a bit differently? I've got a 4-piece pie for harpy egg hatches so that regardless if the PCs are there, it hatches. And then I've got another 4-piece for Mado family return to their farm. I figure they'll try at some point, PCs or not. This helps me think of the landscape around the Company as changing, but only changing in ways that the PCs would care about or have knowledge of. The harpy egg I noted would also be one occurrence of several that would lead to harpy domination of Bero's Boon. Perhaps Huguklah ain't there the next time we come to try to trap coypu and otter for some coin. Wouldn't that be a trick.
• I was absolutely floored by how invested everyone was into protecting or trying to solve the problem of their downed friend, especially since their downed friend's 'reason to be downed' was a known quantity. It sold my on everyone's investment in the world and in the notion of quick companionship. I was moved.
• I am once again moved by ritual and the way people dig at magic in a world where they know it's possible. Several circumstances happened wherein characters acted with an intention that could not be summarized in any other way but 'something wonderous happens', and as I sat puzzling over some of the conversation at The Cauldron about 'providing wonder' for characters, it came to pass that they provided the wonder themselves. 
• Handing out skills is more fun than I care to express. Peets was being.. badgered? a bit, by Zugg. He has a tendency to be the most timid, but it's clear that he has stubborn opinions. He is the only character who sees slitting an otter's throat and turning it in for gold as a reasonable way to make rent. In fact, the other characters made him return the otters he had brought back with him since the snares weren't his. The next day, he immediately set about making his own snares. Zugg started badgering him again—'We have extra snares that were given to us, Peets. You don't need to make them'—further effort at control. I threw Peets what bones I had: roll Dexterity (I think I set DC 15 or 16)—and he made a snare immediately; in fact, learned basic snare setting in that moment, through imitation. Absolutely could. not. shake. the glow out of him after that. Just keep letting me learn things he said, as the session drew closer to end. I loved it. I loved that Zahir the Half Orc priest's prayers about balance resulted in temporary hit point blessings. Not a thing, but too unique a gesture not to honor with a blessing. I realize I just want to tack badges and stats on to everyone like a Scout Leader. 

Guess I'll need to play again.

(5 days til then, at Time of Posting).