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.

For our third game Rose suggested playing a one-shot that would encourage them to role-play more, rather than projecting the same personality for every character.

Okay then, you’re going to be a gang in Vornheim, because I want to use my book.

I set out to use nothing other than Vornheim to run the game, aside from a couple of random encounter/reaction tables that I made specifically for the situation they were in, and any random gang members they might ask about would take their names from the cat name generator Rose and I are making.

I put together a neighbourhood map using the advice in Vornheim, and I think that is fucking genius. It’s simple, easy to use, and I even think it looks a bit pretty.

Oh and we all got to use the pencils Rose had made for me.

I wrote up a bunch of pre-generated characters complete with mini backgrounds and personality quirks, and randomly rolled for who would play who at the table.

If I hadn’t been delirious with allergies I might have also had the presence of mind to buy us a carton of this on the day:

In the end I can’t say as the whole “just play this guy” thing worked out the whole time; Rose’s charming rustic lapsed into a backwoods degenerate more than once, Ellen’s initiate gave up her hat, and Michael’s impeccably clean knife-thrower decided to rifle through bloodied corpses in a dive bar (I swear, that kid can’t help but steal from the dead), but it was a great game regardless.

As for Vornheim? Eminently usable. I’d never run a city game before, and while I want to work on making things feel more fleshed out, that book made it so easy to run. If you’ve missed out on a physical copy at least get the PDF.

The play report isn’t nearly as long this time around, don’t be scared.

For our second game I wanted to run something where the kids could learn a bit more about exploration, mapping, and time management. Maybe also some terrible consequences? Death Frost Doom it is.

I wrapped it up in my own flesh plague rainstorm thing, printed highlighted and only slightly tweaked the adventure, then threw them at it.

Three sessions and several platters of brie and smoked salmon croissants later it was done. Luckily for them I ran it as a one-shot because otherwise things would be pretty bleak right now.

Things That I Learnt and Brief Notes From the Giant Play Report That Follows:

• As much as I love Death Frost Doom we all work better when things aren’t as oppressing. Our first game was full of horrific things, but somehow they were also immediately hilarious, whereas in Death Frost Doom most every awful thing left everyone pounded by despair. Actual despair right there at the table. Seeing as that’s what Death Frost Doom is built to do that’s a huge credit to it, but we just work better when things are a bit more B-grade.
• Apparently I’m accidentally effortlessly good at making people sad. I think every time I portrayed someone dying I broke someone’s heart.
• I don’t like players mapping in exactly measured squares on graph paper. It takes too long and they start to pay too much attention to that thing, from now on it’s blank-sheet notebooks and roughly drawn joining areas or nothing. Besides, if I was delving underground I wouldn’t be measuring the walls before drawing them, I’d be scribbling a quick reference so I didn’t get fucking lost and only noting the important things.
• After one of the sessions, when we still hadn’t gotten into the underground shrine, Rose told me she’d like it if something happened where they didn’t have any control over the situation, like in the stable in the first game. I nodded and told her that was definitely something to consider, thinking the whole time about all the shrine zombies waiting for them.
• Over the course of the game Michael suffered a steady mental decline, finally dropping his Intelligence to 3 in the underground shrine. He also murdered Zeke in cold blood, but his Intelligence was already low enough at that point for it to be believable that he felt threatened by him.
• Ellen just kept reading things.
• This game also featured our first PC-on-PC murder, entirely justified in-character. Real-life sister-on-brother no less. Amazing.

Now here’s what happened. It’s even longer than the first play report, I doubt anyone will make it all the way through.
 

This is the story of the first game of old school D&D I ever ran/played.

I took Down And Out In Gothmagog by Jeff Rients from Secret Santicore 2011, tweaked it a little and jammed A Stranger Storm from the LotFP Referee Book in the middle of it all, infused a bottle of Earl Grey gin, made a giant pile of sandwiches, and settled in on our balcony for the best RPG session I’d ever had.