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A Dated and Annotated Catalogue of Play Reports

SISSYQUEST2K18


Fiona ran STEAL THE EYES OF YASHOGGHUH again at GenCon and (at least as someone that didn’t go) it was the most entertaining thing about GenCon aside from her documentating her search for a temp sissy.


I don’t have a play report, but I do have screenshots of her google+ updates, and they are glorious.

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Did I Play An RPG Right?


Firstly, I’m going to navel-gaze for a bit:

 

Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine started life as an experiment in formatting my own prep notes (impression of the general area -> sensory/atmospheric information in BIG OBVIOUS TYPE -> everything else), which worked out great in my own game so I published it pretty much as-is, and the vast majority of feedback I’ve gotten is that it works great. For the most part you can just pick it up and go.

But something it DIDN’T do was use a lot of moving parts, or take into account where you came from; the descriptions all assume you’re following the most obvious route.

 

So moving on to new things, I could do what normally happens and make things more generic, get rid of the sensory build-up, so that you need to stop and reference the map to think about what order players see things/where they lie in front of them, OR I could do what I’ve done which is to write multiple entry descriptions for each area to cover every way you could get there including falling from the goddamn sky.

The experiment behind STEAL THE EYES OF YASHOGGHUH is seeing if I can make an adventure that’s just as easy to pick up and play as Feathered Swine, with the same atmosphere that builds when you can just keep going area to area, but with lots more moving parts that affect other areas of the map, tracked events, triggers, missing keys, possible NPC factions, all without being a nightmare to track. I want you to be able to flip to a page and just GO, I want all of the information you need to be there without having to stop and think.

Ultimately, the experiment behind it is to make a fairly complex and organic adventure that can not only be run easily by a brand new DM, without prep and possibly without even reading all of it beforehand, but be played by brand new players.

 

I want them to know that things are happening around them and that there may be unforseen consequences without it being overwhelming or frustratingly confusing, I want them to be able to solve problems without having to pixel-bitch across the whole map pulling levers and finding keys that give no indication that they’ve done the right thing, and shit, I want them to have a lot of fun.

 

WITH THAT SAID

 

FM Geist ran STEAL THE EYES OF YASHOGGHUH for her birthday and fuck me, the play report just makes me so happy, as does the feedback that keeps coming in from her players.

It also makes me exceedingly happy that she ran this while high from a PHONE, so I feel like I’ve done fairly well with those design goals.

ALSO she used my (new) magic rules, equipment packs, and NPCs, and the incident beginning with the removal of the golden spikes is the perfect culmination of everything I try to do with what I write.

Please, give it a read (then read it again, and again):

 

Read the rest…


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I’M GOING TO TAKE ALL THE COCKS: Rose’s Guide to Threatening People in D&D


We’ve been playing regularly the last few weeks which has been amazing, I’m not going to do full play reports because I don’t got that kinda time but here’s a quick rundown of some things that happened since last time:

  • After all the murder and screaming, Tipanius started nailing the chosen of Yoon-Quiun to the town wall while Thoth-Mora set the house full of previous murder victims on fire, then sacrificed his silk rope to escape from a back window to avoid all the concerned townspeople milling around.
  • They then broke into the giant boar pen, made enough successful Naturalis rolls to saddle up about three of them before the guards got to the gate, then Tipanius asked his snake gods politely to constrict two of them and Malatesta charged at the last one on a giant boar with his zweihander levelled over its head like a lance and rolled a fucking 20, skewering him through the mouth and charing onwards until he crashed through the rickety town wall, knocking down a good portion of it either side, and they rode away with all the other boars following them out and leaving the town of Yellow Watch to its spidery doom.
  • They named their giant boars Piggy-Wiggy, Hamish, and Dr. Grunts.
  • They travelled for a while until they found a nice doily seller called Gretchen Horrovich resting on a caravan with a broken wheel after having her screaming horse eaten by something during the night. They quickly made friends and hitched up a boar so that they could follow her to the trade town of Blackpond which I made up on the spot and turned out to be awesome.
  • They wanted to get Florian a proper peg-leg instead of a candlestick, and some kind of harness made for the wizard Felix Longworm so that they can carry him on someone’s back now that he pretty much has no limbs, so I rolled to see how good some local craftsman was (when it comes up I roll a d6 and 6 is unbelievably horrible), and rolled a 1, so soon enough they’d put an order in with Edvard Oman which consisted of:
    1. A prosthetic leg that contains a wheellock pistol that shoots out of the heel, with rotating barrels of pre-loaded shot and powder in the calf that spin around when the foot is pushed forward, as well as several hidden storage compartments and a flanged mace on the heel so that if it comes down to it, Florian can take off his leg and beat something to death with it.
    2. Tipanius’s wavy bronze sword and two wavy bronze daggers to be re-forged into two wavy bronze short swords that can be joined at the pommel.
    3. A badarse armoured harness for Felix to wear so that he can be strapped onto someone’s back, that comes complete with a bookrest for his spellbook, a small attached bowl for the preparation of spell components, a little claw thing to be attached to what’s left of his right arm so that he can turn pages, and a lever-activated blunderbus that flips out at the groin.
  • Then his high-pitched apprentice gave them a crutch for Florian and a wheelbarrow for Felix and bid them good day.
  • Florian didn’t have enough coin for his order so he asked Gretchen if she knew anyone he could sell his ruby too, and the only person she knew was a jeweller named Alistair de Mantajo, her ex-lover whom she left because he was taking too many drugs.
  • My performance as Alistair was my favourite NPC I’ve ever done and I’ll miss him.
  • Alistair kept sniffing and crooning and told Florian the ruby was practically worthless, then later that night sent his two goons to mug Florian outside the House of the Purple Haze, a tavern that Florian had not yet entered because he was scared of the friendly brawl happening inside even though everyone but him and Thoth-Mora had already plowed their way through (Florian wheeled Felix straight through in his barrow and got free top-shelf drinks with straws in them for the trouble). Sophie and Emma ummed and ahhed about what to do until Emma decided that Thoth-Mora would run into the tavern screaming “rape”, but then when Florian followed him in the brawlers thought that he was the rapist and lifted him off the floor by his throat until Thoth-Mora pranced over and told them it was actually the two guys out in the alley he was worried about, who then get beaten to a pulp by most everyone from the bar.
  • Gretchen was drunk watching the whole thing and after everyone drinking up to her level they all decided that the best way to get Alistair back would be to go to the stable where their boars were held, fill Felix’s wheelbarrow with boar poo, then dump it in front of Alistair’s house and fool him into coming out and slipping in it.
  • Gretchen danced around with a lantern and her shirt lifted up and it totally worked, then the beaten-up goons turned up so she shattered the lantern in front of them and they ran laughing all the way back to the House of the Purple Haze.
  • Obediah’s teeth started falling out because he’d contracted Gob Rot so he went to see Yeb-Shoth Shub, thereafter known as Dr. Shub M.D., who first of all tried to cure it by pouring mercury into his eyes, which made all his other teeth fall out, then cured it properly and recommended a good dentist, who was contracted to cast a set of sharp metal teeth.
  • Obediah wanted to buy some new clothes to make himself feel better, rolled on my fashion table, and got “An elaborately decorated bustle sprouting from their hips, overlapping organic spiralled layers of silk making it look like an absurd voluptuous cocoon. And it is, carefully chosen so as to hatch a swarm of butterflies at the perfect moment of the night for maximum visual effect.”
  • Rose immediately decided that Obediah had now found his calling as a cross-dresser, so we upgraded him from 0-level swamp scum to a level 1 Specialist with a cross-dressing skill, and used our Cat Name Generator for his new name. Muffin McTavish.
  • At some point we decided that not only does Felix have a beard so wispy that it’s constantly floating around in the non-existent wind, but that his pubes are exactly the same and they hang out the side of his wizard undies and sometimes his pubes and beard touch in the non-existent wind.
  • Thoth-Mora wanted to buy some good drugs to help learn how to cast the spell One Thousand Hogs which turned out to be in his twin sister’s head, and Obediah wanted to get tore up, so they went to see the only drug user they knew; Alistair de Mantajo.
  • He hadn’t seen anyone other than Gretchen during the boar poo situation, and Muffin McTavish used her new (still toothless) wiles to talk down Alistair’s finders fee, then handed over the coin and agreed to meet him that night at the House of the Purple Haze when he had the drugs. Alistair was really, really taken with Muffin.
  • Felix decided to make a speech in the trading square to try to convince someone to join them for the sole purpose of carrying a limbless wizard around, so Malatesta held him up, said “BEHOLD! THE WIZARD!”, and Michael gave the greatest fucking speech I’ve ever heard and I got all hot and sweaty from laughing and I wish I had recorded it and on top of that he made an amazing Charisma check and got his pick of the awed crowd. He now has a girl called Constance de  la Fuente of the Verdigris Plume, who has a sweet bronze-feathered conquistador helmet and a sword and thinks he is just the most amazing thing in the whole world oh my god.
  • Florian found an alchemist friend and bought a supply of specimen jars and preservatives for the Feathered Swine cysts and all the other weird shit he’s been cutting out of things for his future wunderkammer.
  • Malatesta, murdermachine extraordinaire, descended into the Purple Haze fight pit to win some coin, but got matched up against some poor guy that seemed to have no idea who he was or what he was doing apart from that someone wanted to fight him, who then rolled a critical hit, launched himself up Malatesta’s body by almost tearing away his fused sentient breastplate, and headbutted him into unconsciousness.
  • Constance beat the snot out of the same guy, but then got thoroughly kicked by a huge girl called Clara Bilimoria, the Nest of Desire.
  • Alistair’s goons met Muffin McTavish out the front and told her she’d have to pay double for the drugs after all.
  • Muffin put on her threatening face and said something along the lines of “Your balls are going to end up in my mouth. Because I’m going to punch you so hard in the dick that your balls are going to travel up through your body and fly out of your mouth and into my mouth.” Their reaction roll said they were kind of in to that though so Muffin started to hitch up her beautiful skirt and invited them to take a closer look then throat-punched them both.
  • Muffin went to Alistair’s house and knocked on the door while Tipanius and Thoth-Mora ran around the shitty back alley to try to break in.
  • Alistair acted like his goons were supposed to deliver the drugs and was very upset at Muffin’s inconvenience when she told him she hadn’t seen them, and offered her a drink.
  • Muffin asked if there was anything to blow and Alistair blushed and undid his pants, then Muffin punched him so hard in the dick that one of his testicles exploded and while he was writhing on the floor in agony she started screaming at him about her drugs and money and I think threatened him with “Your dick is going to be in my mouth!”
  • Meanwhile out in the alley they can’t pick the lock because neither of them are Specialists and they keep failing to roll a 1, so Thoth-Mora uses Passwall to open a huge hole in the wall and most of Alistair’s kitchen. They find Muffin writhing on the ground because some guy in a dark cloak came out of the other room and slapped her in the face with some kind of horrible mound-fleshed hand which caused a puff of something terribly narcotic to burst out of it.
  • Tipanius pulled the rug out from under his feet then he and Thoth-Mora started beating him brutally around the head with chairs until he threw back his hood to reveal his hideously deformed face and spewed a cloud of gas at them. Tipanius made his save and dove out of the way but Thoth-Mora took it full in the face and got really, really high.
  • The drug fiend grabbed Thoth-Mora and held him below his face, mouth open, and demanded to know who Tipanius was and what he wanted.
  • Tipanius decided to ask his gods to constrict this guy instead, but they told him that he’d have to do a snake dance ritual for it to happen.
  • So Tipanius started dancing and the drug fiend started regurgitating some kind of fluid straight down Thoth-Mora’s doped-out throat, to which Roy replied “I dance even harder” and the next Round an invisible snake constricted around the drug fiend’s throat and then his guts exploded so that all his weird coloured misshapen organs spilled out but I forget how but I remember that they were like every psychedelic album cover ever distilled down and turned into organs.
  • Gretchen turned up because they weren’t at the Purple Haze and she was worried, didn’t object when Tipanius force-fed Alistair some of his drug fiend drug dealer’s organs so that he’d be brain dead and couldn’t tell anyone what they’d done, and helped him take Muffin and Thoth-Mora to Dr. Shub M.D.
  • Muffin just needed some water and a lie down, but Dr. Shub told Tipanius that he’d never seen anything like the bag of organs he was carrying around or what had happened to Thoth-Mora, but that was pretty sure they should prepare for some pretty serious changes in the future.
  • Emma leaned over to Sophie and whispered, “Does that mean I’m going to turn into one of those drug things?”, Sophie whispered back “I think so, yeah”, and Emma straightened back into her seat and softly said, “Fuck yeah.”
  • They all went back to sleep in their room above the Purple Haze, with Thoth-Mora tied to the bed and Felix being spooned by Constance who softly whispered “the wizard.. the wizard..” all night until Felix woke up to the sound of someone twisting the doorknob.
  • Felix softly whispered, “Constance, the wizard is in danger”, so she jumped out of bed screaming “THE WIZAAAAARD” and ran at the opening door and dragged in the first thing she got her hands on, while Muffin threatened from her bed, “I’M GOING TO TAKE ALL THE COCKS!”
  • Soon enough they were holding a lit torch over the crumpled bodies of Alistair’s goons and the Purple Haze barman was apologising profusely for the lax security and offering to dispose of the bodies, but they decided a better idea was to throw them into Felix’s barrow, put a sheet over them, wheel them across town, Charisma and bribe the hell out of the stablehand and his friends, chop up the bodies, and feed them to their giant boars. So that’s what they did.
  • The next day Muffin McTavish and Felix went to see an amazing seamstress for some more fashion, and they all ransacked the hell out of Alistair’s house while he was still writhing on the floor.

 

The party now consists of:

 

An autistic Fighter wearing symbiotic black armour decorated with porcine teats and insects and little worshipping figures and all kinds of weird stuff, carrying around a gold-and-pearl-hilted zweihander that he inadvertently murdered an old man for.

 

A Specialist collecting as much weird stuff as he can so he can start the world’s greatest wunderkammer, who will soon have the world’s most amazingly deadly prosthetic leg.

 

A swamp-born moonshiner who brutally killed most of his relatives due to a spider cult infestation who is starting a new life as a fabulous cross-dresser named Muffin McTavish.

 

A wizard who had half of his arm bitten off, then had his remaining good limbs torn off and digested by thin air the first time he tried to cast a spell, who is now going to be carried around like a wizard backpack by an intense swordsgirl who thinks he is just the most amazing thing ever.

 

A snake worshipper who decided that when he reaches level 2 he should go see some weird sect to perform a ritual that involves his face being eaten off, and results in him being given some kind of amazing goat snake helmet thing.

 

Another wizard who is learning a spell from his dead twin sister’s skull, who is soon going to turn into some kind of perpetually drug-producing mutant.

 

 

 

I love this game.


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“A Dark Blob, Screaming”


Last night we played our first game since the Sleeping Feathered Swine incident.

Rose’s Devotee of the Corpulent One got torn up, set on fire for medical reasons, and left to rot in a cave in that game, so with no Mystic in the party and her brother Roy wanting to join us again, he agreed to test out the new Mystic rules I’d been thinking about.

I randomly threw in “snake worshipper” with the options, which Roy obviously chose, which was great because it meant I got to make a little snake worshipper book and actually write out the new Mystic rules and decide that snakes are the keepers of secrets and sometimes need help solving mysteries so they can know more secrets and are the mortal enemies of the bird god Yoon-Quiun and his blue-bird-troll-looking-motherfucker-chosen who also claim to be the keepers of secrets but are in fact the keepers of lies.

Then a few hours before the game I re-found this print by Florian Bertmer, entitled “Order of the Seven Serpents”:

 

Order of the Seven Serpents - Florian Bertmer

 

So a few text messages later Roy had obviously chosen that over the pure Old Serpent snake cult I’d already made a book for because it’s about a thousand times more metal, so I tweaked the cult and made a new book.

 

And then they were going to need to find supplies and transport when they got out of the mountains so I used my town generator to make Yellow Watch, the last town Michael’s wizard stopped at before going into the mountains with his doomed friends then making new ones. The town ended up being run by militant nudists, and I left it up to Michael to decide if his wizard would think to warn everyone of that. He did not.

 

And I started a world map for them to expand on as they actually visit new places or steal other people’s maps or learn rumours.

 

We also tested out Rose’s Cursed Coral Collection of ceramics because they’re the first she’s ever made and they’re awesome.

 

I’ll do a post with the new Mystic rules and full print-outs after they’ve been fine-tuned a little bit more, but the gist of it is that Mystics no longer have set spells, just free reign to make things happen that they think their god would approve of within general guidelines of power, and a table to roll on to see if it happens or not.

For now, here’s a rundown of what happened last night:

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Playing D&D With Girls Who Work In A Tea Shop And Also My Brother


My brother Michael joined us for this one and rolled up a character while we wrapped up the giant spider murder situation.

Well actually first Sophie showed everyone her first set of dice and the adorable little suede bag she sewed for them, and we talked about Emma’s potential upcoming date but maybe not with a friend of a friend who legitimately “left his card” for her at the store (says Emma, “What’s dating? I don’t know how to date. I normally just get them drunk.”), and we ate some satay, and THEN we wrapped up the giant spider murder situation.

Rose: Damonallit Aspurta, enormous jangling Moorish Devotee of the Corpulent One and his recent convert, Obediah Duncaster the angry overweight drunkard.

Emma: Malatesta du Caddis, autistic murdermachine extraordinaire, and the fabulously feathered maleficar Thoth’mora Gnostos.

Sophie: Florian Voldaris, recently crippled Francish dandy still searching for his purpose in life while hobbling around on a silver candlestick peg-leg, and Sangr’all Humgha, Thoth’mora’s unidentical plump and “booby” twin sister.

Consumables: Rose got this “experience” gift card for being the tits at work, but all the “experiences” kind of sucked so instead we spent it on $200 of red wine, so we drank like two bottles of that and I’m obsessed with sarsaparilla right now and also there was a jam donut tower.

Cameraphone photos throughout taken by Rose.

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“We Burn the House, Everyone In It”


Two of the girls Rose works with at the tea shop have been wanting to play some D&D, so we thought we’d have them over for drinks and a nice shipwrecking at Zzarchov Kowolski’s Scenic Dunnsmouth.

Now they’d never played an RPG whatsoever, so they got sent this email before the game:

 

So you’ll be coming to this place called Malles Vermald, it sometimes looks like this, and other times it looks like this, and sometimes it looks like other things entirely.

 

It sounds like this, and this, and this, and this, and this.

 

It tastes like a choc-chip mint icecream sundae served by a swamp bear on drugs.

 

The time period is kind of a nonsense 16th-17th century renaissance/era of enlightenment type deal, with conquistador-style exploration in vogue and science and anatomy starting to be a thing.

 

Most everyone has a bit of an air of frontier conquest about them but people have been living there for at least a few hundred years without ever having seen a native inhabitant, but historical documents only exist from the last hundred years for some reason.

 

The biggest and best city is Cörpathium, which sometimes looks like this or this or this or this, and was mostly already there when we found it.

 

There aren’t any elves or dwarfs or hobbitses but there are four major ethnicities.

The Moors are steeped in mysticism and have near pure-black skin, like polished ebony, with pupil-less white eyes and rich silk clothing dripping with jewellery.

Urgoths/Saxons are the pale mongrel children of might-as-well-be-Europe.

Francs are like their more effete olive-skinned cousins.

The Morgen are pale to the point of ethereality with epicanthic eyes and bullshit Lovecraftian names, when born they’re anointed to the sect of one of their hundred gods instead of taking a family name.

 

The animals are weird and awful and you’re probably going to lose bits and catch diseases and maybe die.

 

There aren’t simple ghosts and demons but there are things that operate on a different level of existence that might drive you insane or turn your flesh against you or both or something worse.

 

YOU CAN BE ONE OF FOUR THINGS!

Magic-Users aren’t lame old wizards they’re crazy weirdos who risk insanity and mutation and destruction.

Clerics aren’t noble holy men they’re delusional ritualistic heretics who worship things that might not even exist and have to please them to use their power.

Fighters like to hit things with swords.

Specialists have mad skills and depending on what you want to do could be assassins or thieves or trackers or librarians or whatevs.

 

If you super badly want to be any of those things let me know, otherwise we’ll make it up on the day, that’s what Rose always does.

 

And then I threw them on a boat bound for Cörpathium and we started things a little bit differently.

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A Bitter Spirit Called Regret


We finally managed to find the time to actually start our Cörpathium campaign again, so we cosied-up the studio, made two jugs of Goblin Punch [lots of apple/lime/kiwi/banana/mint juice and lime and pineapple soda water and vodka and… look lots of sugar and it ruined me for the next day and I lost my voice around the 6th hour but it was worth it, it tasted like the mid-point of a party where you’re like, “things could go horribly wrong, or this could be the best night of my life, I’m going to find out”], printed some fresh new character sheets, pulled up the spreadsheet for the Rookery of Van Möldus, and rolled our little hearts out.

 

I had this idea to start everyone as 0 level and only gain a class when they do something to earn it or find a spellbook they can read or have religious fever dreams or something, kind of like a DCC funnel except with a single character each and let loose in the sandbox instead of a set adventure. Have to say, it worked pretty damn well.

 

Everyone but Ellen used the automated NPC Birthing Sacs to get an idea for their character, so after rolling for equipment we ended up with:

 

Ellen: Senorita Dos Lumpos, Francish lady in a ridiculously big frothy skirt with a horrible rusted knife and a copper pot.

 

Roy: Azarnoush Al Zahir, softly spoken Moorish giant (17 Strength) carrying a bronze dagger broken from a statue, still with partial finger attachment, a corpsecatcher pole, and three black candles.

 

Rose: Maddock Mohrghast, an imposingly big but weak and clumsy Urgoth that may be mentally touched, carrying a sharp copper blade, a bottle of dark “bog” alcohol (that apparently he’s had since he was 7 and it grew his finger back? I don’t know they made that up while I was in the bathroom), two discarded censer balls from the Church of Dust and Ash, a leather satchel with charcoal pencils and half a notebook, two days worth of preserved rat, and a small collection of mouse skulls.

 

Michael: finally rolled an Intelligence over 5 (well, not on the first try but I let him roll them all again), Elena Sanguine, a petite Francish girl missing an eye, carrying a black blade and a tarnished brass looking glass full of creeping fungus.

 

Bulletpoint play report after the gameporn.

 

 

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New Feierland: It’s Always Raining


So after Rasmus killed himself in the death explosion of the soul-stealing swamp rock elf daemon and his son Remus was confined to the Sanatorium due to black ooze infection a sack of gold and xp was sent to Rasmus’ begrudged and estranged daughter Raeleigh, who sighed, bought herself some swords to hit things, and hopped on the next boat to New Feierland.

 

 

And she didn’t even die or anything. Here’s her diary.

 

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New Feierland Travel Tips: Never Leave Home


I played my first online game by taking a trip to Trent B’s New Feierland, a place every bit as horrible as I’d been told. I loved it.

What follows are the thoughts of Rasmus Carbuncle, Belligerent Soldier of Lost Fortune.

 

 

Well when I came to my senses I was below ground with a bunch of sketchy fellas that seemed to be looking for something, a little nimbly bloke had climbed up to the roof and waved at us when some stitched up dead goatmen fucks came wandering out of the dark.

The prancy magic man next to me cops a javelin through the arm but doesn’t cry much, so I yank it out and stab it in front of us like a pike while he starts waving his arms around. The first dumb dead goatfuck comes charging straight at the pike so while he’s flailing around I behalve him with my horrible blood-rusted claymore, then piss on the shards of his stomped-in skull for good measure. A fella in armour misfires with his fancy-schmancy pistol while another picks up a rock and dusts a goatskull with it, then nimbly little Blixa drops from the roof knife-first and lands in a cloud of broken beastbody.

Javelin boy’s arm-waving stops and the rest of the goatfilth finds themselves caught in some kinda magic web I guess, I don’t know, I don’t traffic with that stuff. We knife them real quiet and head off towards the grumbling roars that started after that useless pistol shot.

 

I pull one of these fellas up and ask for a refresher of just what I’m doing here apart from hitting goats with swords, and he tells me some eye creature is giving the filthy miners bad dreams that makes them not work which is bad. Fair enough.

Little Blixa’s up on the roof again but soon enough there’s sounds like something mighty huge digging its way up from below the tunnel and more of that godawful groany roaring. So we sets up a rope tripline with walrus tallow all smeared over the rocks in front of it while the noise gets louder, and Blixa buries red and blue gems under the stones further into the tunnel like a crazy fuck before climbing back up to the roof.

 

Out of the darkness comes this slimy bulk of god damn rock dragging itself along with its forelegs, staring at us with glowing green eyes and making our trap look powerful stupid. Blixa looks like he’s going to throw up for a second then handwaves something about eyes being bad but I don’t get it. It drags its body over the buried gems and there’s a great fucking explosion, the slimy moss covering it catches fire and it starts running at us and I take a few discrete steps backwards.

Blixa drops from the roof like he’s going to knife it in the face but falls flat on its head with a wet smack, staring into its eyes then sliding off and falling right in the fucking grease we were going to light up.

The fella in the heavy armour and this big Salt Soldier the prancy magic man summoned up start taking swings at the thing between getting smacked away, and rock-thrower Gaffer Grunion sticks with what he knows but passes out as soon as the rock leaves his hand. Okay eyes bad, I get it now. The handy bloke next to me lassos Blixa with a nice silk rope so I grab it and pelt in the opposite direction, which is pretty easy seeing as he’s all greased up.

 

Behind me fireballs are exploding and grown men are soiling their pants, I flip Blixa over and grab every explody gem he has left and stuff it into my ded rat sack.

The big rock sludge fuck is on fire now, stomping around in flaming grease and beating the shit out of the Salt Soldier. I open up my Monkey Skull Snuff Mull and breathe deep, I feel good, this is good, I run at the big dumb rock fuck staring at my feet and hurl my precious rat sack right into its big dumb face. I feel good.

 

 

 

What follows from this point are the thoughts of Remus Carbuncle, in New Feierland to find his father Rasmus.

 

 

 

Well, this place is awful. No one knew where my father had gone except for this dwarf guy and now that we’re here, the people my father had gone with are climbing out of a stinking hole in the ground covered in blood and filth, telling me that my father just saved them by blowing up a flaming rock creature with a stupid amount of exploding gems and dead rats not ten minutes ago. They say the resulting unholy green explosion vapourised one of their friends and a chunk of stalactite took my father’s head clean from his shoulders, leaving his body to slump to the ground in a fountain of blood. I don’t know why they would tell me that.

 

They lead me to his body and I lose it for a minute, screaming at the dark. I take his Monkey Skull Snuff Mull and his Sabatons, still full of warm piss, he would have wanted it this way I think.

They tell me all about the things you can find in this godforsaken hole in the ground and my ears perk up at the Alter of Transmutation, or Transformation, Trans-fuckingsomething and right now I want nothing more than to be something else. They lead me to it and I take a hit of booze for my father, then pour it onto the alter amid my falling tears. My knees go weak and my stomach cramps and I’m rolling around in the caltrops some fuck spread around the alter while I wasn’t looking and I’m vomiting and rolling in the vomit. When I can stand up the only thing that seems different is that looking at light hurts like hell and I want to scratch my eyes out. I hate this place.

 

We go back out into the caves and ignore whatever’s flapping around in the dark and come to a short hall with a barred door. Some stitched abomination is standing inside and the little guy they call Blixa spritzes holy water through the bars which of course makes it start sizzling and throwing itself against the door snapping its teeth. They’re all talking about throwing rocks at it until it dies or wasting crossbow bolts and I tie a rope around the hilt of my sword and start jamming it through the bars until the thing is dead, stupid thing doesn’t even stop throwing itself at the door.

 

When it’s in pieces they find a box in the room that Blixa pries open with a crowbar, he pulls out some axes and a book and some kind of spice pouch and I don’t care.

 

Back out in the caves and then we find a room with a round wooden door standing slightly ajar. The room inside is round too and looks like some kind of lab, with two benches carved right into the floor in the middle.

There’s a grated cabinet towards the back and they all start hitting it with things and fucking up their weapons, but hey the cabinet is slightly dented now so whatever makes you happy.

Blixa climbs up on the roof and I grab a hooked pole from the wall and walk towards the door with this Salt Soldier thing. Next thing I know some miner with pale skin like black-shot marble is pulling himself around the corner with a sack in his hand. The others try to ask him what he’s doing here but that black shit is pulsing and he’s getting closer so I swing at him with my new pole and break myself off a piece.

He screams to his friends of course but then Blixa’s dropped a net on him and I’m stabbing him in the back with swords, but then his friends drag him away and shut the goddamn door on us!

 

They’re yelling something about us stealing their treasure but we haven’t even got anything yet and from the sounds of dropping stones I think they’re trying to brick us in?

We smear oil around the floor and rig up a rope attached to the door, running it around the corner of a bench for leverage, three of these guys yank on it and get the door back open but two of them fall down and seven miners come running into the room, including the prick I sworded in the spine. I lob the rest of my booze right into his face but before I can throw a torch the Salt Soldier topples over and knocks it out of my hand. God damn it.

People are tussling on the floor with these miners and getting black vomit all over them, then Blixa smashes his lantern into the oil and two of the fuckers light up like pyres, so I hook booze boy with my pole and send him staggering into the flames.

 

And right there, when it seems like maybe things aren’t always fucking terrible in this place, right there is where the big guy in all the armour comes swinging through the smoke, misses the miners, and fucking stabs me. If I were to measure how good I feel on a scale of ‘hit points’ right now I would give it a solid none, none hit points. No wonder my dad is dead.

He mumbles an apology and scuttles off and I’m still standing so I charge at the smouldering miners with my sword, hoping for a shishkebab, and what I get is my sword knocked out of my woozy hands and black bile spewed all over my right arm.

The skin is tight and chewing and I’m on the floor, I reach for my poniard to hack off the arm and everything goes dark.

 

I’m cutting off the arm but no matter how much I cut there’s always more arm, and then all the right arms have been cut off but they’re always regrowing and the severed ones crawl up to my mouth and try to climb inside, the hands on the floor detach from their arms and they’re shiny new piles of goo and they tear at my ears and nose and they become goo too and always always I’m cutting and it’s eating and I want to wake up but I’m not asleep but this is a dream but there’s always more arm.

 

When I wake up we’re outside and they’ve amputated my arm to the shoulder, they say there’s still more of the black shit in my shoulder though, it’s spreading towards my face, they’ve tied me up and I have this overwhelming urge to bite something.

They say they’re taking me back to town to find someone that can help me, Blixa says he owes me a blood debt for what my father did, they say they need to lock me up in a box now. That seems reasonable.

 

 

 

 

Remus is now back in New Feierland, locked up in the basement sanatorium of the newly founded Baron Blixa Von Apfelsaft of Barovia and Barovania Center For The Amelioration of Unspeakable Afflictions. Blixa takes his blood debts awful seriously and is spending more money than Remus has seen in his whole shitty life to save him, giving the matriarch healer of the area 10,000gp now and promising another 40,000gp if she’s able to find a cure instead of burning the still-living body as is customary in New Feierland.

When they opened the box it was full of black bile and he was growing a new arm and snapping his teeth, so uh, we’ll see how that goes.

 

 

New Feierland: Utterly Terrible 10/10 Would Play Again.

 

 

Appended Obituary by Trent B:

 

The look on his face makes it wonderful.

 

Like… Pissing into his only nice thing, being a pair of steel boots, whilst not even using his fly correctly and holding a dagger… nothing in that registers as being anything worth any kind of thought or emotion. It’s just exactly what needs to be done. All of it. He’s not even looking. He’s like staring down the shitty road that he is in the middle of, just waiting to finish pissing in his boots so he can put them back on and keep walking.

 

Worst character.


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Tales from Cörpathium, Chapter One: Dick Puncher


Last weekend we took our first foray into Cörpathium as a small-time mercenary band looking to gain some coin and reputation. I didn’t have much time beforehand so I came up with a few jobs they could take and the main preparation was keying a map for the only job that required crawling through a building.

They did not take this job so I ended up winging the whole session.

Other things I learned? The city tables that I made work great in having the city and the player’s experience grow in a natural way, but are a bit much to be happening all the time given how many boroughs they’ll be constantly travelling between, and I also want the city to feel more full, I want the different boroughs to have their own atmosphere without me just constantly making shit up, so I can concentrate on what’s going on in the game instead of worrying that I’m making the environment interesting enough.

So, I’m probably going to do up a document that sets out each borough with common sights and sounds and smells, common activities for different parts of the day, major landmarks (“Oh you want to go to a brewhouse? The biggest one in this borough is the Thirst of the Leviathan. whispering inaudibly: and down a hidden staircase they drain vagrants of blood into a grate in the floor.”), and a table of mundane encounters specific to that borough, then likely make it a 50/50 chance when travelling between boroughs of rolling on the city encounters, or that borough’s encounters.

 

Drink of the day was a Marquini, using Regal Rogue Vermouth and Earl Grey infused No. 3 London Dry Gin.

 

Rose: Octavius Goldenloins (Fighter Lvl 1) – Overconfident tinyman with an oiled moustache and a feather cape.

 

Michael: Ballmar the Girthy (Mystic Lvl 1) – Oblivious Lover of Bakhri, the only healer, probably the greatest liability. (I let Michael re-roll his Ability Scores twice and he still ended up with an Intelligence of 5)

 

Roy: Gravelax Bowel-Shatterer (Maleficar Lvl 1) – Wearing spell-inscribed leather armour decorated with jaunty shrunken heads and teeth. On the lookout for more teeth.

 

Ellen: Madame du Lumpé (Specialist Lvl 1) – Ex-madam of the Black Rose whorehouse, her black left hand is still full of the poison that was meant to kill her.

 

 

The mercenary band, the Gilded Loin, receives messages regarding several jobs.

Sister Nektaria Siourthas of the Cathedral of Lost Virtue needs help finding a missing Whaugur, Octavius’ old friend Holt Brueghel is trying to organise protection for a merchant caravan headed to the Möndfels, bibliophile Ryszard Schmaler is looking to recover stolen property, and Cordell van Heerden wants help reclaiming a derelict library.

They head straight for the Cathedral of Lost Virtue.

Let’s do this in bullet points.

Read the rest…


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