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Notes

Year In Review – 2021 – Spitting in the Face of the Bat Plague

The second year of blogging has come to a close, time to take stock. Contrary to my hopes and expectations this time last year, 2021 turned out to be the second year of playing in times of a global pandemic. In spite of this, we managed to continue our gaming.

What we played

So what did we play? Most notably, I refereed two seasons of Castle Xyntillan using my homebrew classic D&D rules, Hackbut. Season two ran for 14 sessions, from late January to late April. Season three lasted 10 sessions and ran from mid-September to mid-December. In between these, from early May to mid-July, one of our players stepped up to “warden” a season of Mothership. We played one session of The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and 10 sessions of Gradient Descent. Over summer I ran a two-shot of The Coming of Sorg, again using Hackbut. When circumstances allowed for it, we managed to resume our monthly face-to-face boardgame night. To celebrate, I acquired Kemet Blood & Sand, which according to many is the pinnacle of Matagot “dudes on a map” games. We managed to play this three times between late July and late October.

With regards to our ongoing Castle Xyntillan campaign I kept pretty extensive records. What follows is some data on attendance, character deaths, and experience points. Just for kicks.

Attendance

Like last year, our play group numbers 7 players, not including me. Most sessions had 2-3 players attending, with average attendance being 3,6. Season 2 had an average attendance of 4,4, season 3’s average attendance was 2,6. This drop in attendance is probably the result of a number of factors, including big life events for at least one of our players, and perhaps also some fatigue with online gaming setting in for a few others.

Attendance

The top 3 players were good for 66% of the attendance. This was 56% in the previous year. This shift can be explained mostly by one of our group not participating at all this year, and another only playing in the beginning of the year.

Number of players

Character deaths

Ah, killing player-characters, the thing every classic D&D referee enjoys doing the most. I am kidding of course, but still, deaths is a good indication of how hazardous my game is. Seeing as how a key distinguishing aspect of classic D&D is that it is a game of challenge for the players, character death serves as a reasonable proxy for it.

Deaths

In total, 10 player-characters died in the dungeon. That’s an average of 1,7 per session. The most PCs killed in one session was four, which happened during session #18 when the company had an ill-fated run-in with a bunch of ghouls.

Retainers were unluckier still, with a total of 27 perishing across this year’s two seasons, for an average of 2,3 per session. The most retainers killed in one session was five, during session #33, when the company got lost in a pocket dimension forest.

Overall, 37 characters were killed by the dungeon, for an average of 1,5 per session. I don’t have a baseline to compare these numbers to, so I really can’t say if I run an extraordinarily deadly game, or if I am soft-pedaling it. I guess over 1 PC killed on average every session is kind of rough, but I don’t go out of my way to try and slaughter them. In fact I often feel bad about not giving the players the challenge they deserve. Maybe this number is an indication I should relax a little on that front.

Experience points

In any case, was all that dying good for anything? I would say so. The players brought back 132.796 XP. This breaks down to 84.754 XP in season 2, and 48.042 XP in season 3. That is an average of 5.533 XP per session (6.054 XP in season 2, 4.804 XP in season 3). I think it is safe to say Castle Xyntillan is a pretty generously stocked dungeon, but not overly so. I think this nicely offsets its lethality. Yes it is easy to die in the dungeon. But it is is also easy for players to get back into the game reasonably quickly, and level up past those first fragile levels.

Experience points

All of this XP is from treasure recovered, at a rate of 1 GP equals 1 XP. I award no XP for killing monsters and in case you are wondering, magic items also do not yield any. Another important thing to note is that players get to divide XP between all player-characters that participated in an expedition as they see fit. I do not enforce shares for player-characters.

The highest single haul was 15.900 XP, in session #21 (in season 3, the biggest score was 11.660 XP during session #34). In general, it is those wine barrels in the cellar that are the real money makers.

The seven currently active player-characters between them have acquired 106.393 XP. The average party level is 4.

The lowest level character is Guillemette, a level 1 thief, with 432 XP collected over 4 sessions. But this character saw no action this year. The next lowest-level character is Robert, a level 2 cleric, at 2.529 XP, all of which was acquired in one session.

The highest level character is Hendrik, a level 6 magic-user, at 36.000 XP, collected over a whopping 24 sessions of careful, diligent play. Level 6 is the highest level in the game and the magic-user is of course the class that requires the highest amount of XP. Getting there was quite an achievement, well-earned.

Closely following Hendrik is Jürg, a level 6 fighter / level 1 thief, at 31.600 XP collected over 14 sessions. Jürg is the only multi-classed character in the game. I wonder if more will follow now that some of them are plateauing and have no use for XP anymore. It’s also worth noting Jürg began life as a retainer (and husband) of this player’s previous PC, Bartolomea.

Blogging

Moving on, what happened with the blog? I mostly wrote play reports, for Castle Xyntillan seasons 2 and 3 (see the index), as well as the Coming of Sorg two-shot (a, b).

I also continued to write up commentaries on my homebrew ruleset, Hackbut. This year I covered the four character classes, equipment, encumbrance and retainers.

WordPress tells me I had 3.519 views and 1.188 visitors over the past year. This is of course very modest, and in truth I pay little attention to this sort of stuff. I do promote my posts on the OSR discord server and my twitter, but not anywhere else really.

The best performing posts this year were the first Castle Xyntillan play report, the thief class, and The Coming of Sorg.

I got quite a bit of traffic through referrals from Beyond Fomalhaut (thanks Melan). Most of my visitors are from the anglosphere (US, UK, CA) and also from The Netherlands of course.

Looking ahead

I hope I will be able to keep our weekly online D&D game going. It is definitely something that keeps me sane, and a welcome outlet for my many creative urges. I think we have one more season of Castle Xyntillan in us. I might try to add a new player or two to our group, so that we push the average attendance back up to the 3-4 mark. We are a close-knit group though, so recruiting will have to rely on our immediate social networks.

After Xyntillan, I think I want to try my hand at running material of my own fabrication. I have come to realize that this is the purest form of D&D, homebrewing everything, and I want to experience it first-hand. I have been quietly chipping away at a mid-size dungeon (about 120 rooms across three levels) and am about half-way through completing it. It is strongly OD&D inspired, but filtered through my personal fantasy canon, which is very much in a science fantasy vein and includes things like Masters of the Universe, Storm, and The Incal.

Of course, once we are able to, I look forward to once again playing games face-to-face, but that will most likely mean more boardgames. I recently acquired both a copy of Tigris & Euphrates, and Quantum and I hope to get those to the table in 2022.

In terms of blogging, I will continue to write up play reports for as long as I referee games. I like keeping a record of what happened and most of all reflecting on what went well and what I can improve on as a referee. Occasionally I get a comment saying others are getting some use out of them as well, which is always nice. I also intend to continue the series on Hackbut, although we have now hit the section on running the game, which may lend itself a little less well to the kind of posts I have been doing so far.

In any case, despite circumstances, 2021 was another good year for me for gaming, and I hope to maintain this in the year to come, bat plague be damned.

Categories
Actual Play

The Coming of Sorg – Classic D&D One-Shot – Part 2 of 2

After a break over August, our group is resuming the weekly remote D&D game. Attendance may be lower than over the past year and a half, because in our part of the world society is gradually reopening. For some of us at least, this means a return to something resembling a normal social life. As a result there are more diversions on Friday evenings besides logging on to Zoom and throwing some dice.

Anyway, for our first post-summer game I had nothing prepared and it just so happened we had the exact same group as during the last session, when we ended our play-through of The Coming of Sorg on a cliffhanger. As a result we decided to pick up where we left off. Good thing I had blogged notes, and also took photos of the battle map.

The Party:

  • Hetz Zuril, level 3 thief, carrying a potion of animal mastery, and a ring of regeneration
  • Baiar, level 3 fighter, wearing a girdle of giant’s might
  • Cobrynth, level 3 cleric, carrying a staff of mastery and a ring of telekinesis
  • Ralik & Tovak, heavy foot soldiers
  • Trisdik & Mazian, handgunners

Play Report:

We resumed at the moment when the party had penetrated the high temple had engaged in combat Vnaud the high priest, his acolytes, and the rhino-sized demon maggot known as Sorg. Long story short, Baiar the fighter and his two heavy footmen and two handgunners make short work of most of the acolytes. The thief Hetz Zuril takes out the high priest with a well-aimed crossbow bolt from a concealed position. Meanwhile Cobrynth the cleric uses his staff of mastery to compel a pair of acolytes to throw themselves at Sorg. The acolytes screamed in pain at the bile that spurted from Sorg’s wounds, and melted their daggers. The players concluded simply stabbing away at Sorg would not be the solution. The unfortunate dominated acolytes were then used as human shields against Sorg’s bile spit attack. Baiar closes the distance and aided by his girdle of giant’s might tips the demon from the altar it was draped over, and proceeds to bash it with the altar itself! Cobrynth, having run out of acolytes to control, uses his ring of telekinesis to levitate a piece of crumbled column from outside into the temple to plug up Sorg’s disgusting bile-spitting orifice. Sorg ultimately succumbs under the extreme violence inflicted on it but the party, but not before exploding in a mess of bile that destroys much of the arms and armor of the men standing close to it. At the end of it all, two men-at-arms have perished, and the remaining two have had their fill and ask to be let go, which Baiar graciously does.

Afterwards, the party heads outside and inspects the pool adjacent to the high temple. There they find the rapidly decaying corpse of an enormous fish-like demon. (It has perished with the departure of Sorg.) They then continue to what Cobrynth, who is a cleric of Deel, knows to be a brewery. Here they are surprised by a group of cultists led by a man named Len, who wears an eye-catching medallion.

An uneasy conversation develops. The party asks the cultists why they are holed up in the brewery. They say they are hiding from the emanations produced by the demon in the high temple, whom they believe is not the real Sorg but an imposter. The party say they have destroyed Sorg, which the cultists don’t believe. The party are confused as well, and try to confirm if the cultists are on the side of Sorg, or not. The cultists readily agree they are still fully on board with the idea of summoning the real Sorg. This, paired with the prospect of treasure in the form of the necklace worn by Len, is enough for Hetz to take a surprise shot at the leader. Len is severely wounded but not killed, and immediately disappears between the barrels. The acolytes attack but are made short work of by Baiar and his henchmen. Len retaliates by knocking out Cobrynth with a sneak attack of his own. Baiar digs through the barrels with his giant strength, locates Len, and unceremoniously ends his life.

They pocket the necklace. Cobrynth is revived with the help of Hetz’s ring of regeneration. And here we decide to end the adventure, for real this time. During the customary debrief, I explain what was in the other buildings. We talk a little bit about the different ways they could have approached the adventure.

Referee Commentary:

Some reflections on what happened during the session, in no particular order:

  • A high-level thief as adversary can be quite deadly, if ran correctly. I managed to resist the urge to have Len simply charge the player characters and instead had him hide so he could take pot shots at them. Made for an interesting dynamic.
  • The conversation with Len was the first time I tried to apply my “new” doctrine for running social encounters. After an initial exchange in-character, I ask the players what they hope to get out of the conversation, and I make sure they are clear on what the NPCs’ goals are. We then try to somehow resolve the scene swiftly, either by rolling some dice (typically a reaction roll from my end) and/or simply roleplaying a little more. This made the whole thing drag on much less than it usually did.
  • My players have developed a strong treasure-seeking reflex from many sessions in Castle Xyntillan under a xp-for-gold regime. This on-page adventure is very thin on treasure as written. Running it as a one-shot with pregens this is no big deal. But as part of a proper campaign it would definitely need some work.
  • I again ran combat in my “new” approach. At the top of each round I declare what monsters will be doing, then players declare what they are intending to do, we roll for initiative, and then we resolve each side’s actions in the order of movement, missile, magic, and melee. This makes for a smoother back and forth. Some players expressed that they like the extra gambling element that comes with having to declare before initiative is rolled. I should say though that I do allow players to adjust their course of action if events during the round have radically changed the situation. Within reason, of course. I am also not super strict with the order of actions, but I do think I will change them to the following: missile, movement, melee, and magic. This is roughly in order of how fast each action can occur.
  • This new approach to combat also opens the door to the possibility of interrupting a spell-caster, although I need to think some more about what it would take exactly. Being engaged in melee? Or also being shot at? Only if you take damage? Something to think about.
  • We also had an interesting situation with a character disengaging from melee. I rule that you use up half your movement if you want to get away safely, but then I had an acolyte catch up and get a bonus for attacking from behind. This maybe also happened because we use circular tokens on a battle mat and those don’t have a facing. Obviously, when you safely disengage from melee you should keep facing your opponent and so they might be able to catch up with you but they would not able to stab you in the back.
  • The dominated acolytes being used to block off Sorg’s bile spit attack was an interesting case to adjudicate. I decided they would simply block off one attack and then perish. But looking back I could have also treated them as cover, say for a -4 to-hit. And if the attack failed by that margin rule that the dominated acolyte was hit in stead.
  • Similarly, I had to think on my feet about how much damage a demon larva would take if it was bashed with an altar by a character wearing a girdle of giant’s might. I think I was really generous and went with three or possibly four dice of damage. But I could have also stuck with the general rule that a character using this magic item simply does double the normal damage. We were using the item descriptions from Delving Deeper in this game. Afterwards I cross-compared with Swords & Wizardry and Old School Essentials and it’s kind of interesting to see how they differ.
  • Come to think of it, Sorg should have probably only been harmed by non-mundane weapons. Oh well.

And that’s about it. This one-page adventure was an interesting experience to run. I think to make it really rewarding under a classic D&D framework, it needs more work from the referee, particularly on the front of treasure. I felt a bit dissatisfied when we finished, because after defeating Sorg there isn’t much else to do. In hind sight I should have just ended the game when the demon was slain, and narrated what happened during the mopping-up afterwards. But I did not have the presence of mind to do so. Better luck next time.

Categories
Actual Play

The Coming of Sorg – Classic D&D One-Shot – Part 1 of 2

We finished our first season of Mothership with Gradient Descent (it’s been a lot of fun). Our co-GM felt like a break and we had one more session on the calendar before hitting pause for the month of August. So I decided to run a one-shot using D&D (in the form of my homebrew ruleset Hackbut). Looking around for something simple to use, I ended up picking a one-page adventure site from Trilemma Adventures Compendium Volume I. The original PDF of The Coming of Sorg has been in my to-play folder for quite a while. It also comes recommended by Skerples. So I generated some 3rd level characters, slapped some stats on the module’s monsters, and we had a fun couple of hours seeing if our heroes could set things straight. Read on for a play report, and I will close with some commentary at the end.

The Party:

  • Hetz Zuril, level 3 thief, carrying a potion of animal mastery, and a ring of regeneration
  • Baiar, level 3 fighter, wearing a girdle of giant’s might
  • Cobrynth, level 3 cleric, carrying a staff of mastery and a ring of telekinesis
  • Ralik & Tovak, heavy foot soldiers
  • Trisdik & Mazian, handgunners

Report:

They approach the compound from the south. The wall has largely collapsed. Buildings are ruined. Mud is everywhere as well as the occasional decomposing body part.

They make their way to the dais, which used to function as the compound entrance. It is remarkably clean, except for a few scorch marks. Rusted chains lie at the foot its steps. Pillars on each side are engraved, noting anyone who passes through is blessed by Deel.

They carefully head around the east perimeter. They inspect a cave entrance at the other end of a pond. They dare not enter. Heading back into the compound they next check another cave entrance into which flows a small stream. They can see faint lights glimmer in the darkness. Cobrynth uses telekinesis to lob a length of wood into the stream. It disappears into the darkness. Nothing happens.

Hetz clambers up the sheer rock face without much trouble. Here he sees broken and defaced statues at each end of stairs leading up, hewn into the side of the hill. The steps are besmirched by evil scrawlings. Not a soul is in sight.

The thief drops down a rope for the rest to follow, but they opt to take the stairs in stead. About half way up the cleric and retainers are overcome by the curse resting on the steps. The retainers begin to scarf down all their rations and drink. Cobrynth flings flask after flask of holy water in every direction. Acting quickly, Hetz uses his giant strength to herd them all back down the stairs.

As they regain their composure, suddenly a loud bang and a bright flash of eldritch light emit from the high temple followed by an awful scream. Shortly after Hetz sees a massive jelly roll down the temple stairs. For a moment, it appears the thing is heading straight towards him, but it continues down the next stairs towards the party below.

Confronted with the monstrosity heading their way, Cobrynth raises his staff of mastery in an attempt to control it but fails. Hetz flings a flaming oil flask from above but misses. Baiar, aided by his girdle of giant’s might, tosses an enormous boulder at the thing but somehow also misses. The handgunners fire their arquebuses and one manages to hit. The ball simply ricochets off of the jelly. Meanwhile the jelly is frantically trying to grab someone with a pseudopod but fails. Cobrynth uses his ring of telekinesis to scoop up a couple of liters of water and douses the jelly with it, but it appears to have no effect either. Baiar and his heavy footmen move in to melee with the thing. Their weapons instantly dissolve.

At this point, the party decides to make a run for it. Thankfully, the creature is awfully slow. They make for the dais and reach it well before the creature closes the distance. It stops at the edge of the stairs leading up to it, apparently not willing or able to go any further. Cobrynth levitates a boulder within Baiar’s reach, and he tosses and hits the jelly. This projectile bounces off the thing without harming it either. Just when the party begins to despair about their chances of defeating the jelly, it begins to crawl off in search of easier pray.

Meanwhile, Hetz has silently snuck up to the high temple, two prepared flaming oil flasks in hand. He sticks is head into the doorway and sees an awful spectacle. The interior has been thoroughly trashed. A large group of cultists is fearfully chanting. They are lead by a thoroughly degenerate priest, and are stood around an enormous demonic maggot dribbling bile from a puckered maw. The thief does not hesitate for a moment and lobs his two missiles straight into the mob. They both hit an acolyte straight in the back of the head. The men crumple to the ground screaming, engulfed in flames. Pandemonium breaks out. Hetz disappears into the shadows.

Meanwhile the remainder of the party make their way up the rope left by Hetz, and carefully but decisively head up towards the high temple. When they reach the temple gate they see three cultists emerge from the doorway up ahead clearly looking for something or someone. Baiar and his men run up to engage them in melee. Cobrynth uses his staff of mastery once more and manages to gain control over two of the three men. They fling up their arms in obeisance. The third is stabbed in the back by Hetz who suddenly emerges from the shadows, and finished off by a mighty punch from Baiar.

Pressing their advantage, they send the two remaining cultists back into the high temple. Cobrynth has them tell the high priest that they succeeded in finding and killing the culprit. Satisfied, the leader turns his back to them to resume the chanting in service of the maggot that he refers to as “Sorg”. Right away, Cobrynth has the cultists stab their leader in the back. Again, pandemonium. The traitors are jumped by acolytes. The high priest, who has survived, begins to prepare a spell. The demon maggot stirs and aims his puckered, bile-dribbling mouth at the source of the disturbance.

Our heroes respond with no hesitation. Hetz emerges from the shadows to backstab the high priest. Baiar and his men run into the temple to lay in to the mob. The cleric follows a few steps behind, undoubtedly preparing some powerful miracle.

And we fade to black.

Referee Commentary:

It had been a while since I took place behind the proverbial referee screen and I must say I missed it. Playing is fun, but there’s nothing like the amount of thinking on your feet you need to do as a referee. This being a one-shot, with a very loosely described module, I found myself playing it loose myself as well. I tried to say yes more often, and in particularly in combat try to stay close to the flow of the emerging narrative and avoid getting too bogged down in details.

With regards to combat, I tried a different approach from the one we had been using in our Castle Xyntillan campaign (inspired by OED). We still used side initiative, rolled each round. But in stead of going around the table and resolving player actions one by one right away, I in stead first declared what the monsters would be doing, then had the players tell me what their intent was, and then roll initiative. After that, I would resolve actions for each side roughly in order of: movement, missiles, magic, and melee. (This is inspired by Robert Fisher, and Daniel Bishop.) On paper this should be slower than the OED approach. But in practice it’s about on par, and somehow makes combat feel a bit more dynamic, which I like.

We weren’t using Roll20 for this, obviously. And although the module map is gorgeous, I did not want to share it with players because I felt like the amount of detail would bog things down. So I set up a second web cam, pointed it at a dry erase mat and logged into Zoom twice. This is a trick I’ve seen some people use on YouTube and it actually works quite well. I know you can share a second camera from the same Zoom session, but I dislike the way it then makes videos of everyone else very small. I want to be able to see my friends when we play, after all.

The pregens I created were all level 3 characters. My method is somewhat influenced by OED. I did three for each of the four classes in Hackbut. Rolled 3d6 down the line for attributes, except for the prime requisite, which got 2d6+6. HP was rolled randomly (1s and 2s were re-rolled). Alignment was assigned randomly using 1d6: chaotic on a 1, lawful on a 6, and neutral for the remainder (clerics are all lawful). Names I also randomly assigned from a list created with the excellent Fantasy Generator. I let players pick whatever equipment from the standard lists they felt they need, as well as retainers to round out the party to a maximum of seven total. I did, however, determine magic items randomly using the method Delta sets out in OED, with a few minor tweaks so that it also works for clerics (he runs a game without). I used the Delving Deeper treasure tables for this. Just the act of assigning some items to each of these otherwise pretty faceless characters makes for some interesting choices for players to make. It works really well and I recommend others try it.

Creating statistics for the monsters and NPCs was next to no work at all. Seeing as how I use HD as a proxy for both attack bonuses and saves in Hackbut, all I really need to do is assign HD, AC, and attack damage. I used d6 hit dice this time around, and I must say I really like it because I can easily roll hit points on the fly that way, and combats go faster. I mostly used the Delving Deeper and OED monster listings as a frame of reference.

On paper, the module is all about faction play. Players being players, of course, they bypassed all the encounters tucked away in the lower-level compound structures, and went more or less straight for the high temple. Despite this, the thing is nice and atmospheric and at the pace we play I think we could maybe even get two 2-3 hour sessions out of it. But in this case we were going to stick to a one-shot, so when we were rolling into the big confrontation and we were hitting our customary end time, I felt it was fitting to end on a cliffhanger.

Update (September 14, 2021): We ended up properly finishing this adventure after all. Read on for part 2.