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

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 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.