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Actual Play

Castle Xyntillan – Session #3 – Smash and Grab

The Company:

  • Els (C1)
  • Heinz (MU1)
  • Jaquet (F1)
  • Ynes (T1)
  • Alina, Benjamin, Midja, Nico (heavy foot soldiers )
  • Lucas, Manuel (porters)

Casualties:

  • Els — bled to death from a ghost-inflicted wound

Loot:

  • Eery dagger
  • Crudely engraved copper sheets (9)
  • Flint-tipped spears (6)
  • Primitive drums (3)
  • Stone hand-axe
  • Loathsome mask

Report:

After last session’s TPK, the company is joined by some freshly rolled-up PCs, and a generous helping of retainers. Committed to finally acquiring some significant treasure, and not dying in the process, the company sets out for Castle Xyntillan once more. Upon arrival, they decide to enter the castle at the same point as previously, through a side entrance in the rose garden. Their first goal is to check the armoury where the previous party perished, to see if their bodies, and the treasure that accompanied them, is still present. When they prepare to cross the galloping hallway they are surprised and relieved to find the phantom horses absent. They proceed to the armoury and find it still unlocked, and littered with the bloodless corpses of their fallen comrades, save for the body of Michelle, one of the porters. A loud banging from one of the closets is judiciously ignored, and the company begins to strip adventurer bodies of their valuables.

Despite their preoccupation the company becomes aware of something or someone shuffling down the hallway towards them. While they ready their weapons a corpulent priest decked out in valuables appears in the doorway. He introduces himself as Reynard Malévol and lecherously ogles the company’s cleric. An exchange develops and the company and the priest take turns trying to sell each other indulgences at outrageous rates. Ultimately, the priest gives up, bids the company a good day, and shuffles off into the darkness.

The company briefly debates whether to follow and rob the priest, but ultimately decides against it. Instead, they decide to press on. Exploring the galloping hallway further, they soon come across another door. When Jaquet checks it, he is swarmed by animated severed hands. A brief melee follows and the hands are slain with little effort. The room itself turns out to be empty. The company moves on.

Not more than 10 feet further down the hallway they find an intersection. Peering down the north branch they can see the faint outline of what appears to be a motionless bear standing at the edge of what is certainly a large room. They toss a rock at it, and when the thing topples, they congratulate themselves but decide to first explore the remainder of the galloping hallway in the western direction.

The next door opens on a room littered with mouldy rags. One particularly large pile has a sword sticking out of it. When the pile is gingerly picked apart the musty corpse of a dandy emerges, the sword sticking out of his torso. While searching the room, the company is once again alerted to the sound of something approaching them from the hallway. This time around, they are faced by the awful appearance of semi-transparent naked man with an ashen complexion, his body covered in bleeding lash-marks. Els does not hesitate one moment and immediately begins a turning attempt, but fails. The ghost angrily responds by lashing out at her, and opens a deep wound across her face. Retainers and companions attempt to strike and shoot the monster but their mundane weapons appear to be useless. Despite her injury Els continues her turning attempts and ultimately succeeds, she pushes the ghost back into the hallway, and it recedes into the darkness. Although relieved to be rid of the monster, the company must still deal with Els’s wound, which oddly continues to bleed profusely. Staunching the bleeding with rags does not help, and so in a moment of desperation, Jaquet heats a dagger in a torch and presses it onto Els’s face. The wound is cauterised, the bleeding stops, but not before Els has succumbed to the trauma.

Horrified, but also grimly determined to not let Els’s death be in vain, the company once again decides to press on. A door leading to the west is forced open and the company is greeted by a nightmarish spectacle. In the middle of a room stands an open casket, with an eldritch light shining from it, and blood dripping upwards pooling on the ceiling. A number of phantoms are seen dancing around the casket before suddenly disappearing. Benjamin gathers his courage, steps into the room and looks into the casket. He sees a pitch-black outline of a body with a dagger sticking from its heart. He boldly pulls the dagger from the body. The trickle of blood becomes a cascade and a chorus of disembodied voices begin to shout. Benjamin rushes from the room, dagger in hand, while behind him the voices reach a crescendo and then fall deathly silent. At the same time, the eldritch light from the casket is snuffed out and the room is shrouded in darkness.

Relieved and somewhat emboldened they press on. They return to the galloping hallway and open the doorway at its western end. The next room is empty. Once again opening a door to the west, they enter what appears to be another empty hallway. Here they try the first door to the north and are greeted by an awful apparition. An ancient woman, eye sockets crawling with spiders, moths circling her unkempt hair. She introduces herself as lady Odile, and proceeds to harangue and curse the company for having the temerity to enter her family’s castle and insists they leave immediately. Rudely, the company instead decides to attack her, and after a brief melee the crone flees into the darkness.

Discouraged by the succession of empty rooms the company backtracks and returns to the branch off of the galloping hallway at the end of which they spotted the bear-like shape. They move down the hallway in formation and enter a large space. Four pillars are held up by statues of monkeys, and a collection of stuffed animals observe the various entrances. What is more, a man with a horrific black leathery visage, dressed in hunters’ garb, sits in a throne accompanied by a pack of dogs. An exchange develops in which the huntsman interrogates the company’s motivations for exploring the castle, and hints at the possibility of “accompanying him on a hunt”. When he appears to grow bored of the conversation, he blows a horn and disappears, along with his dogs.

The huntsman in better days (The Boke of Haukyng Huntynge and Fysshyng)

Puzzled, and slightly apprehensive of the stuffed animals, some of which appear to sometimes move ever so slightly, the room is briefly explored. Heinz finds that each monkey statue speaks when he stands in front of it: “see no evil,” “hear no evil,” “speak no evil,” and (you guessed it) “smell no evil.” Jaquet pushes the throne aside but finds nothing underneath it.

Frustrated by the lack of treasure, the company forces open the door to the north and enters yet another empty hallway. They take a door to the west and, curse this castle, find themselves in another empty room, except for a bricked up doorway to the south, and the vague sound of drumming in the room’s western section. The sounds grow louder as they near the south-western door. Forcing it open, they are greeted by the curious sight of what appears to be a collection of primitive arts and artefacts. Engraved copper sheets hang from the walls, supplemented by flint-tipped pears, wooden shields, drums and a number of man-sized reed baskets. But the thing that catches the eye most of all is the idol of a hunched caveman hanging over a prehistoric altar.

When they near the idol, invisible entities begin to beat the drums. The sounds becoming louder and louder, before suddenly stopping when they arrive next to the altar. After freezing for a moment to see if a bad thing might happen to them, the company begins to loot the room. The altar is soon discovered to have a removable lid. Inside, a cavity is filled with a resin-like substance. This is made short work of with the heat of several torches, and from the goo emerge a stone hand-axe and a decidedly creepy mask.

Collecting their plunder, the company decide to end the expedition there, and carefully but swiftly retrace their steps, leaving the castle the way they came, thankfully encountering no more of its denizens.

Referee Commentary:

This was a fun but challenging session to run. We had a large party, and I rolled an above average number of random encounters. These were fun to role-play, but at some point, all the improvisation becomes rather taxing. By the time we hit the menagerie and the encounter with the huntsman, I should have called for a break to take in the room’s extensive description at leisure. Instead I skimmed it on the fly, and missed some important details, primarily the fact that the stuffed animals attack on sight. I won’t beat myself up over it, but I will try to learn from it and take it a little bit slower at our next session.

Also, I was a little but puzzled as to what the huntsman’s motivation should be. He’s a bit of an enigmatic figure and neither the room description nor his writeup in the monster list are of much help. But looking through the rest of the module to see where he pops up, I think I am going to consider him a recurring menace to the company, whom the huntsman will start to see as a fun quarry for his hunting endeavours.

I suggested we try to stick to one delve per session for the time being, and I made sure players understood movement rules and how they will be able to move more swiftly through previously explored parts of the castle, which allayed some concerns they had over not being able to delve deeper within the confines of a single session. The main reason I like this is that it simplifies having to handle absentee players, and also makes division of treasure and XP more straightforward.

The company also finally succeeded to bring back some treasure, although a considerable amount is either magical, or does not have a listed value in the book. I’ve decided the primitive artefacts will fetch a small sum from a collector back in town. But they will be more hard-pressed to sell off any magic items if they choose to do so. I’ll probably make it a n-in-6 chance, and for sale value use the XP-values of magic items listed in the 1e DMG as a guide. They also lucked out on finding the remains of the previously killed party back in the armoury. I decided to handle that with a roll as well. Maybe I’ll handle it differently in the future.

7 replies on “Castle Xyntillan – Session #3 – Smash and Grab”

I’ve been going through some of your Xyntillan posts recently and they’ve been great reading! Thanks for writing these notes.

I made sure players understood movement rules and how they will be able to move more swiftly through previously explored parts of the castle, which allayed some concerns they had over not being able to delve deeper within the confines of a single session.

This is something I’m struggling to explain with myself. How do you handle returning back from a delve?

The rulesets I’m looking at using (Whitebox: FMAG, Basic Fantasy) don’t have specific rates for movement through familiar areas but OSE allows 3x regular movement rate at referee discretion.

I like the one delve per session format so I’m trying to figure out the best procedure to implement it.

For some reason, the whitespace in my comment got stripped so it appears as a big wall of text. Sorry about that.

Hey thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment. Always nice to hear that these posts are of some use to others.

Highly recommend a strict single delve per session format. After we made the switch we never looked back, and have never really struggled with it since.

For leaving the dungeon, I ask players to tell me what route they intend to take. Then I make a single encounter check, if that comes up, I randomly determine where along the route it occurs. If no encounter is rolled they simply make it out and back to town without trouble.

What this means is that if you leave enough time at the end for resolving one more encounter if it comes up, you’re good. In our case that means players typically opt to head back out about 30 mins before our session end time. This also leaves enough time to tally treasure, assign XP, etc.

I got this rule from Delta.

With regards to movement rates: my classic D&D hack also pulls from Delta. We use the standard MV rates (12/9/6/3). A player can cover MV/3*100′ while exploring the dungeon. Movement through known areas can be up to 5 times this rate.

This means in practice I usually don’t have to count squares because players will usually stop to do something before they have used up their movement for the turn.

If you look at the Castle Xyntillan map you will also notice there are sort of these “highways” running through the dungeon — long corridors with hardly any doors. This means players can get back to where they left off previously without triggering too many random encounter checks. It works for us.

Awesome! Thanks for all the pointers. That helps.

The procedure for leaving the dungeon is clean and straightforward – I like it and thanks for posting the movement table. I’ve been trying to work out the procedures to enable the one-expedition-per-session format in my head since some of the implications of the movement rules weren’t quite clear to me so seeing it laid out like this helps solidify it for me.

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