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Actual Play

Castle Xyntillan – Session #7 – Sword Riot

The Company:

  • Jaquet (F1)
  • Buerghedorn (F1)
  • Heinz (MU2)
  • Ynes (T1)
  • Bartolomea (C2)
  • Milia, Lionel & Benjamin (heavy foot)
  • Mena, Mathilde & Lucas (porters)

Loot:

  • Vial of liquid and small dagger
  • Signet ring
  • Gold-rimmed spectacles
  • Bottle of brandy, champagne & vial of aquavit
  • Mace

Casualties:

  • Milia — choked by a cloaker
  • Lionel — decapitated by a man-eating hat
The company? (Gustave Jean Jacquet)

Report:

Following last session’s windfall, this week’s downtime is a relaxed affair where money is no object. Retainers are hired, items are identified, supplies are replenished and Heinz even finds the time to scribe his first honest-to-goodness scroll (magic missile, of course). Subsequently, the company sets out for the castle again.

They decide to once again use the grand entrance. Previous expedition’s members respond with a shrug when the western statue erupts in laughter again. The rest of the company is less indifferent.

Things immediately go south when they enter the vestibule. The cloak, along with hat, cane, and shoes jump from the coatrack and rush to engage the company. Milia is almost immediately enfurled and choked by the cloak, Lionel is soon decapitated by the hat. Mathilde immediately flees at the sight of several retainers biting the dust. The remaining porters hold their ground. Benjamin rushes forward to join Jaquet and Buerghedorn in what is now the front rank, and a fight develops on the doorstep of the castle. Jaquet enters his +2 axe’s battle rage. Heinz makes good use of his wand of lightning, dealing ridiculous amounts of damage to the conjured creatures. Bartolomea tries dousing the things in holy water but finds they are not harmed by it. Jaquet, Buerghedorn and Benjamin hack away, Ynes takes potshots with her crossbow, and at one point, desperate to turn the tide, Heinz even summons the wand of the deep woods’ guardian. Ultimately, the company prevails, but it’s quite the desperate start to the expedition.

Having collected themselves, the company checks a couple of rooms to the west of the vestibule but those turn out to be largely empty. They return to the vestibule and try to first door to the east. It opens on a large room shrouded in unnaturally dense shadows. It contains a grandfather clock, a writing desk piled with papers, a closet, a chest and a fireplace.

Bartolomea and Heinz start rifling through the papers on the desk. Ynes begins to investigate the clock. Jaquet pops open the chest. Buerghedorn pokes around the fireplace. The papers turn out to be ravings of a madman. They do find what appears to be a hit list, which includes the name of the bishop of Chamrousse, as well as (at the very bottom) a certain “Louis”. The chest holds a false compartment with a vial and a small dagger. Buerghedorn pulls the strangled body of a young gentleman from the chimney, who soon after collapses into a cloud of ash and jumble of blackened bones. Ynes spies bones in stead of gears inside the clock, and an owl on a platform in a compartment above the clock-face.

Just when Bartolomea fishes a signet ring from the moth-eaten clothes in the closet, the rear-guard cries out in horror at the sight of blood being sucked from their pores. It’s another group of those damn glitterclouds at the door leading into the room from the vestibule! The company has little appetite for a fight with the things, so Jaquet swiftly moves to slam the door shut before they can enter the room, and it is spiked with a dagger in the jamb. After a moment of pressure from the other side, things turn quiet. Satisfied the clouds are kept at bay for the moment, the company turns their attention to the other doors in the room.

A door south opens onto a stairway leading down into darkness. With a loud “no thank you” the door is shut again.

Meanwhile, the clock is shoved aside to check behind it. Suddenly, the clock begins to strike and the owl pops out, loudly proclaiming “doom, dooom, doooom!” The company braces for what comes next, but is relieved to find nothing else happens.

The first of two doors to the north opens onto a sitting room. A decapitated corpse is slumped in one of several armchairs set around an oak table marked with deep cuts. There is also a wardrobe in a corner. They kick the corpse from the chair and are relieved to see it collapse on the floor. When Bartolomea pulls open the closet, a stream of skulls fall from it. She begins to pick through it, and eventually turns up one bearing a pair of fancy gold-rimmed spectacles.

Heading east, they enter a cosy den with a card table, couches and liquor cabinet. The walls are also covered by a large number of swords on display. The centerpiece is a sinister-looking zweihander with a nameplate beneath it: “The Blade of Rel”.

While some are investigating the card table and others are pillaging the liquor cabinet, Jaquet and Buerghedorn jostle for position at the zweihander. Buerghedorn wins out and before anyone can intervene he grabs the sword from the wall. Instantly, all the edged weapons that the company is carrying spring to life and go for their throats. Ynes and Jaquet are cut down. Acting swiftly, Bartolomea manages to pull Jaquet from death’s door with a cure light wounds. Ynes recovers on her own accord and is further revived with a swig from a bottle of brandy from the liquor cabinet. In the meantime, Buerghedorn struggles for control over his faculties with the chaotic sword and fails. Furthermore, the swords on display also come to life and attack. The complete company flees in terror from the room and barely manages to evade the blades.

Back in the sitting room, they take a moment to debate how best to egress from the castle. They are worried about the clouds in the vestibule, but also dislike the bedroom to the immediate west, which has an oppressive atmosphere and a lantern swinging back and forth under the influence of some unseen force. Before they can resolve their dispute they are interrupted by a bunch of headless manservants entering from said eery room, and halting in confusion at the entrance.

They attempt to get rid of them with some bluffing but the manservants aren’t impressed. Overcome by the blade of Rel, Buerghedorn in stead chops down one of the manservants, and the rest attack in anger. The company makes a run for it, but Buerghedorn is compelled by the blade to stay and hack away. The rest of the company return to the large room, pull the dagger from the jamb and throw open the door. To their relief, the clouds have departed. At that moment, Buerghedorn manages to wrest back control from the sword and turns to run as well. The manservants pursue, but the whole company succeeds in shaking them off and emerge into daylight from the grand entrance. Buerghedorn tosses the blade into the castle moat in disgust. Exhausted, the company begins the two-day journey back to Tours-en-Savoy.

Referee Commentary:

“Regrets, I’ve had a few…”

This was quite the action packed and chaotic session. When we ended I felt like I had made a number of less-than-great calls.

The opening fight did go well, I feel like I am getting an increasingly solid handle on how to run fights purely theatre of the mind and despite the large-ish number of combatants things proceeded at a satisfying clip. The only thing I am still a bit unsure about is how forgiving to be with positioning in melee. Next time I might try to keep a small dry-erase battle mat next to me for keeping track of everyone. I do this now with pen and pencil in my notebook but when a combat takes a while and positions change it resists quick updating.

Where I really stumbled was room E7, the den. As usual, a combination of fatigue and an unreasonable desire to keep things moving conspired to make me misread the room key. My unfamiliarity with the intelligent sword rules also made me unnecessarily cut corners on resolving the situation. As a result, when Buerghedorn’s player grabbed the sword of Rel, I did not have all edged weapons make attack rolls against the PCs. In stead I had each PC who carried edged weapons save, and those who failed I rolled their weapons damage for. I also forgot about their retainers. Furthermore, I botched the control check on the sword by leaving out the wound modifier (I’m using Paul’s reinterpretation of the OD&D control check, which is relatively straightforward, but still more math than I would have liked). So Buerghedorn lost control, but I was then at a loss what the weapon would want. I also overlooked the fact that he should have been taking damage each round, following the B/X rules I am using, because he’s neutral and the sword is chaotic. Only later did I realize my mistake about the weapons in the room and did I read the detail of twenty swords on the walls. I then narrated that they were coming to life to attack as well. We rolled for initiative, they got to go first, and were able to speed out of the room. My final mistake here was that the room entrance is curtained, but I narrated that they slammed the door shut and the swords flew into it. With curtains, it would have been a different story. For some reason I misread the key here too (I have a tendency to confuse left/right, east/west, it’s an annoying flaw) and I also disregarded the key difference in the map, even after a player asked me about it! What the hell was I doing? I know what I was doing, I was rushing. And I shouldn’t have. I’m not kicking myself because the players probably got off easy. I’m bummed because if I’d run this sequence of events as written, it would probably have been even more dramatic than it already was.

So, for the umpteenth time, note to self: do not rush. When you notice yourself feeling overwhelmed, just take five already.

This session also has me reconsider the intelligent sword rules I am using. I am now wondering which rules Lux uses himself. I notice all swords but one only have ego listed, no intelligence, but these ego values tend to be quite high. I suspect Lux uses something similar to the 1e rules. And I might start using those, via OSRIC. The main thing I would like to know is how to interpret the ego-only stat block to understand how intelligent a given sword is, and specifically what (if any) capacity for communication it has with its wielder.

There are more regrets, mainly to do with unfamiliarity with a lot of D&D tropes, such as wands disintegrating when they are depleted (a thing that should have happened when Heinz went HAM using his wand of lightning). I guess I should chalk up some or most of those things to learning. But others are really my own fault, and I hope next session I will manage to take things a little slower.

2 replies on “Castle Xyntillan – Session #7 – Sword Riot”

The den is a tough room. Back when I ran it, I chickened out and turned it into a magic hostage situation instead of a combat with the swords. Also, I still have no idea how to run intelligent swords.

I hope the Blade doesn’t stay at the bottom of the moat. Lots of opportunities for drama there…

I have to admit part of my reluctance was the need to resolve 20+ attack rolls. I should have the confidence to do that. I tend to roll “in the open” on discord, and we use target20, so it’s actually trivial to see how many of a sequence of 20 do hit.

Intelligent swords are indeed a bit of a thing. I tried parsing OD&D’s rules but there are just too many vague statements for me to bother. OSE’s rendition of the B/X rules are crystal and if I squint they look more or less the same, except for the control check rules.

My main question at the moment with Xyntillan is that most of those swords appear to be chaotic and none of my players are running chaotic characters. Given that swords do damage each round to misaligned wielders I’m not sure how they’ll ever make use of them without first changing alignment.

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