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tankfish
May 31, 2013
When I ran the thousands thrones I ended up making the chicken the mayor. The backstory being the original lord used a little used law to avoid taxes put Nugget the 1st in charge. Over a few generations the chicken mayor is now the villages pride and joy. Which in my group made more sense on why everyone was desperate to find this random bird.

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Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

tankfish posted:

When I ran the thousands thrones I ended up making the chicken the mayor. The backstory being the original lord used a little used law to avoid taxes put Nugget the 1st in charge. Over a few generations the chicken mayor is now the villages pride and joy. Which in my group made more sense on why everyone was desperate to find this random bird.

That is incredible.

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


Josef bugman posted:

That is incredible.

"You have to get that chicken back or we'll have to pay taxes" is pure Warhammer.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones

I Suspect The Omi Alliance



tankfish posted:

When I ran the thousands thrones I ended up making the chicken the mayor. The backstory being the original lord used a little used law to avoid taxes put Nugget the 1st in charge. Over a few generations the chicken mayor is now the villages pride and joy. Which in my group made more sense on why everyone was desperate to find this random bird.

See, I was onto something with Nugget, goddamnit. One of my consistent problems with Thousand Thrones is it sometimes has an okay adventure setup early on (the next one is actually a great idea for an adventure, and 'find a chicken but accidentally destroy a conspiracy' is how Warhams do anyway) but then bungles it in its desire for railroading, shitheads, and sometimes torture/mutation porn. Right there is already a reason that makes sense and fits with the Imperial tax laws and crazy legal morass that make the Empire so charming in its own way. Warhammer is at heart partly a setting about being a goddamn mess that somehow bungles through.

When last we left the heroes, they had been dragooned into investigating the disappearance of Nugget, 7th Chairmain of the Tojo Clan (actually a chiken named Gretta, but look, I love Yakuza) by 30 armed men with nothing better to do so a magistrate wouldn't have to deal with a 'scold'. Our heroes (who will take on the name The Thousand Crowns, because that's how much they each hope to make) aren't especially happy about this, and are especially unhappy about having all their weaponry taken for the moment. Sif reassures the party she is capable of at least four forms of unarmed killing if it comes up. When you take the PCs' weaponry, they will know something is seriously up. It also feels like an unnecessary extra bit of assurance they'll stay and do the damned quest; there's already 30 armed men (well, 26 men, 4 women) with nothing better to do but point crossbows at them until they look for the chiken.

In fact, let's talk about this railroading a little. At a certain point, it's actually more believable and much easier to fit into the setting to just say 'Okay, everyone, I promise there's a more interesting adventure in here like you probably suspect. Will you give it a chance?' and ask the players why their PCs might agree to investigate the chicken. Maybe they're bored or tired, or they're promised free lodging for the night if they do it and it's too late to get on the road anyway. Maybe they get a decent couple bottles of wine, or a few crowns for travel expenses (they do get promised 3 crowns each in the normal adventure). Maybe one of them likes chickens. 'Why do you guys look into the chicken' is easier than 'I took your weapons and a large party of armed men are watching you at crossbowpoint'. The latter is not only ridiculous, it pisses players off and makes them look for ways to gently caress with the scenario. You don't get players to 'play along' at gunpoint, you just cause them to try to run away from main plots (I think Thousand Thrones' style of writing is one of the reasons Terror in Talabheim had to spend so much time on 'how to convince players not to run away') because gently caress dealing with this.

Oh, also, if you absolutely refuse, you will later be attacked by 12 vampires while you have no weapons in an effort to punish you by forcing you to burn Fate since you didn't play along with the adventure. While locked in stocks. The 12 vampires of 'gently caress you for not going with my railroad' are something to keep in mind.

The PCs are assigned a helper, the town scribe Dwali. Dwali is an exiled dwarf who annoyed the Longbeards and Loremasters back home, and he's basically a petty little poo poo. He knows humans think of dwarfs as two-legged, bearded grudging machines, and he uses a mixture of petty bureaucracy and this reputation for grudging to always pretend to take offense at everything and try to make humans uncomfortable. He also uses a lot of khazalid to try to make people misinterpret him so he can chew them out, because he's a piece of poo poo (like most Thousand Thrones characters). If you have a dwarf like Oleg, he actively tries to avoid them. He can point out everyone in town, he offers little hints (but they say, to keep him from being too helpful, he should randomly and knowingly lie to the PCs or give bad information half the time just because he's a dick) and he's mostly along to be a jerk. Oleg points out to the party that this lovely little beardling probably has a reason not to be in the mountainhomes since he looks like he's going to throw up every time he looks at the sky, and they mostly resolve not to bother with him. An NPC who randomly lies to you for no reason half the time is not how you do a helpful hint NPC.

Frau Gertrudt, whose chiken is missing, is an enormous woman. She's 6'4", nearly as tall as Sif, and 'half again as wide'. Sif is instantly pleased to see her, because she reminds her of home, and she can respect other gigantic women. Gertrudt is written to be impatient with the players and unhappy about the theft of her chiken (she has names for all of them and treats them a bit like pets), and she's a little suspicious of strangers (logically, because a swarm of crazy sigmarites just ripped through town and stole property and people before moving on, the whole 'the Crusade just passed through here' bit mostly doesn't actually factor into the adventure). However, she's honestly one of the less dickish people compared to Magistrate Thirty Armed Men and Shithead Dwarf. She's (kind of rightfully) annoyed the magistrate fobbed this off onto an adventuring party instead of doing it himself or using his thirty armed men, she's pissed her property is covered in radical Sigmarite vandalism, and she wants her chicken back. Johan tries to break the ice a little by mentioning he's a former sanitation engineer and offering to clean off the graffiti while the others work, and they get to investigating while he mops.

Searching the coup brings up a +10 Search Test To Continue Plot, then the bane of adventure writing: The Follow Trail To Continue Plot test. Remember: Follow Trail is a fairly rare skill, and it's Advanced. PCs cannot make it without having it. This came up in Paths of the Damned, too, where it had mandatory Follow Trail but also a pre-made party without the skill. Even Oleg, who is a genuinely competent Ranger, does not have this skill yet. In its place, the frustrated GM just lets them use Perception. They find a small blood trail leading from the coup to a broken fence after making enough mandatory checks to continue. Look, this is not the way to do these. Perception checks are important, being good at looking around matters a lot. But you should use 'you always get enough info to continue the plot, successes just get you enough to make some conclusions sooner, or move faster, or find extra treasure, or get warning of some incoming bullshit' because otherwise we're all sitting around rolling Per until someone succeeds anyway, which is effectively the same anyhow but with more wasted time. The prevalence of Per-10 etc To Continue Plot is one of the many things that marks this campaign as a bad Warhammer adventure.

Anyway, with a blood trail leading out of the yard, it's pretty clear the chicken is dead. Either that, or Nugget beat up a bunch of Yakuza and escaped (or a body double got shot with a rubber bullet or something). It was probably a fox or something. Armed with the knowledge that something has probably happened to the chicken, the heroes return to find Johan getting the writing out of the walls. This isn't in the adventure, but I'd imagine being reasonably polite and taking the investigation seriously (or cleaning her house while the others look for the chicken) would probably improve her mood. Either way, Gertrudt answers any questions they ask about if her chicken had any enemies. She mentions the deaf old man Eysen was working his field when the chicken went missing and he's next door, and that the town bailiff Neyetz had 'a hungry look' when looking at her chickens and envied them. They now have a second witness and a potential motive, and Sif ensures her fellow giant that the chicken will be found or avenged. This is now a matter of honor and involves someone who looks like her mom. Gertrudt is somewhat impressed. But only somewhat.

The potential witness is near deaf (you're encouraged to have him constantly misunderstand the PCs to annoy them) and nearly blind. He was also recently whipped raw for accidentally tripping Lennhardt, the older brother of Lucas, our actual villain for this adventure. If you'll recall the summary. The whole challenge here is to make the old man understand you're looking for the chicken while he 'comically' misunderstands, and he has almost no information besides that he found a torn piece of cloth in his fields on the day the chicken was taken. It is here that the party having a smart Halfling would comes into its own if the penalties weren't so unreasonable. Once you find the cloth, you can make a Very Hard (-30) Heraldry test to recognize what family it belongs to. Shanna has a 31 Int; she's great at math, but average at most other things. She's not going to hit that, despite Halflings all having that skill. He also won't give you the dumb thing until you go get him some frog pie from a Bretonnian immigrant. One of the things to note: No-one in this town has an actual character. Everyone just has a gimmick. And usually a fetch quest. Stealing the scrap of cloth will be noticed by the town (somehow) and everyone will dislike you, so no, you're not getting around the fetch quest, go talk to the Bret. The GM spent three hours practicing a terrible racist french accent for this by watching the chef song from The Little Mermaid and he is going to use it goddamnit. Katarine offers to have a look at his scars since she's a 'doctor' (she'll get there yet), but while the old man is grateful (after ten minutes of annoying 'comical' misunderstanding) he wants that pie and nothing else. Shanna offers to make the man a pie or something (Halfling), but no. It has to be the FETCH QUEST pie (In reality, there's no thinking about the possibility the party has a Halfling or someone who is skilled in piecraft)

At the local tavern, if you ask the tavern keeper about anything he coughs on you (and doesn't know anything) and causes a Tough-10 check or get Weevil Cough. Weevil Cough causes -10% to everything for 3 days and -2 Mv. This is one reason I've never really liked the Disease rules; they tend to get used like this, where it's just a weird little gotcha. Thankfully for our heroes, Katarine has a Fortune point and avoids being made sick with a reroll. She offers to help (she is going to do this with everyone who is sick or injured, damnit, she need practice) only to find the tavernkeep is constantly sick and nothing helps. This is not a plot point, it's just here so he won't know anything and can cause disease. It's his character gimmick. They run into the Bret, who is a charming young Agitator whose quotes are all butcherings of quotes from Voltaire and other famous French authors written with a stereotypical accent. She's just hanging around working on pamphlets to send home, where no-one can read, while criticizing the class system of the Empire but acknowledging at least it's not Bretonnia. She'll give them the pie if they get her a library book from the a local citizen's private library (he doesn't want to be involved in 'politics'). Goddamnit. She simply wants to look up some stuff from a famous book on common folks' perspectives on the Empire for her own research and writing. Francine Arouet doesn't have a statline, which is a little sad; she'd make a good addition to a party if you have a new player who joined late or someone lost their character recently. The Thousand Crowns already have their 'reasonably sympathetic female NPC we recruited' slot filled at the moment, though.

Note there's also no option to charm her or try to talk her into helping you. Social characters can't do anything to help the investigation or skip steps in the fetch quest. The other guy here is critical path, and Francine is important to learning you can get him drunk to learn whatever (as well as giving you the pie slice so you can get the other clue). Bailiff Neyetz loves to gamble, and can't hold his liquor. As a result, he hangs out at the bar, tries not to drink, and plays cards, a lot. He's extremely good at them, so he gets +20 to Gamble tests. He can be tricked into playing cards with the stake of taking shots (he can't turn down a game) and if he loses 2 games, he both tells the PCs the next clue (His reeve was out walking near Gertrudt's farm when he wasn't supposed to be, 4 days back, the night of The Chickennapping) and 'three or four shocking facts about NPCs' before passing out. Hooray! To learn all this, first, they must continue The Fetch Quest.

The next NPC is actually a famous Imperial Mathematician, which means Shanna knows of him instantly. She is astonished to meet THE Johannes Gephardt in this backwater little town, and she's extremely excited to have a reason to visit him. Gephardt is already fairly friendly and open to the PCs visiting, but on realizing they have a mathematics enthusiast in their ranks who has actually read/can understand some of his work, he's even happier. The locals don't actually like him; they tolerate him because he's famous, but most suspect he's a Mutant because he has pox scars from surviving the plague at one point. Gephardt is also a believer in the strange idea that the Colleges of Magic are a bad idea, since they are 'sequestering knowledge'. Syphan plays along with this a little, explaining this is why she left her homeland in Naggarythe, and Johannes is probably the first person she's met learned enough to possibly place her accent and realize she's not an Asur. He doesn't notice, being too excited to meet someone who will entertain his weird theory about how there shouldn't be a large, specialized facility for teaching extremely dangerous skills in a controlled circumstance (in truth, Syphan would kind of prefer to have learned magic someplace like the Colleges). Still, speaking to a mathematician and an elf wizard makes him happy enough to share a book if they leave something valuable as collateral (he'll help if you convince him you have an academic interest, this counts). Syphan leaves her own textbook On Ye Basic Spellcraftiness with him, which he can't actually read as he doesn't speak Lingua Prestentia, but he's very impressed with it. He also offers to help them research the scrap of cloth once they get it to him.

If you failed the original Heraldry test, this is where you find the scrap belongs to a 'Hollenbach' family. Not the Von Spiers, like PCs might have suspected. This doesn't immediately help, but it will help an awful lot going forward. They get what they need from Johannes, learn about the crest, and then manage to gamble Neyetz under the table with Shanna's math and Sif's actual knowledge of playing cards (and her tremendous ability to withstand alcohol if/when she loses most of the games). They've finally completed the goddamn fetch quest, and can Get On With it.

No, there's no way to speed any of this up! You will go through this long, linear fetch quest, picking up each clue in order, and you will like it! If you do not, 30 armed men! 12 vampires! Thousand years dungeon!

Next Time: Maybe Vampires, finally

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones

Wrong Wilhelm

So having completed their fetch quest, the heroes go to talk to the Reeve. He's an insufferable rear end in a top hat who tries to bluster like a living thesaurus, and for once, the solution really is to just punch him in the face. For one, the Warhammer Cops/30 Armed Men/12 Vampires are not watching (though I forgive any party that assumes they are, they have no indication this is the solution and past experiences have probably told them it isn't allowed). As he blusters and tells them he'll tell them nothing, Syphan casts Light to make it look like she's charging up a spell. The book notes you only possibly get information if you actually hurt him and he still lies to the team, telling them he saw Lennhardt von Speier take the chicken. Despite seemingly getting the information, Sif punches him in the face while he's distracted. Syphan is annoyed Sif ruined her 'thing', but Sif hasn't hit anyone all adventure and was getting dangerously bored. Oleg tells them both to settle down. The Reeve makes a WP test at -10 per Wound he suffered to still lie to them, and Sif hits hard, so he does not have the will to lie. He drops the thesaurus act and just tells them he saw Caspar Schmidt (the guy who 'hung himself'; Lucas killed him), and that Lucas paid him to implicate Lennhardt. This immediately makes the party suspicious; the younger brother paying people to spread rumors that his brother was grabbing chikens for nefarious purposes? This sounds like some kind of inept cult intrigue.

Next up, the PCs go back to the magistrate to inform him of all this and tell him they have a Case on their hands. He ignores this, but gives them a writ to go talk to Frau Schmidt and investigate her husband's suicide. Rumors in town are, naturally, that she henpecked him into killing himself (or that the chicken became a giant battle chicken and ate him). I'm going to keep pointing this poo poo out because it is going to keep happening. There's a lot of ways to gently caress up meeting Frau Schmidt, who is 'not unattractive' (her only physical description) but sharp enough to realize her husband's sudden suicide just seems off. They all involve being a dick for no reason. Katarine talks to Schmidt and offers her sincere condolences on what happened to her husband, while Oleg notices something: The beams on the rafter broke wrong. You only get that clue; you need an Int test or to realize out of character this means he didn't hang himself. Someone hung him up there, likely after he was already dead. Oleg quietly informs the others they have a murder on their hands. Being non-dicks, they're able to convince Frau Schmidt they're simply here to investigate, and the writ gets them into the study, where they find Schmidt was also researching a 'Hollenbach' family, and was purchasing sleeping draughts despite having no hint of insomnia. The go back to Gephardt to investigate the family name more, and discover it's associated with a family that was suspected of vampirism and necromancy and condemned by the Hunters nearly 500 years ago. Goddamnit, we've got Vampires in the barn. Someone get the licensed and bonded Ghoul Wrangler.

Combined with a rash of missing animals, a sudden murder of someone who was probably kidnapping animals, and Lucas paying people to implicate people, well...it's not hard to put together they need to talk to Lucas. The only way to do so is to get a letter of introduction. To do that, they need to talk to his friend, Wendell Ott. Thankfully, they were not dicks to Wendell, so he'll just help. If you were, or were more neutral with him, the Magistrate warns you to be gentle with the man and to make a bit of a show of an apology to cheer him up. I'll be honest, the 'the whole town is trying to help out the poor depressed guy' bit is one of the subplots I really like. It's a nice little touch, PCs won't cause trouble if they aren't jerks, and it's kind of nice to see people actually trying to help and support someone who's hurting; most of the people you meet in this campaign are assholes or come off as sociopaths so a little bit of actual empathy and kindness is nice to see. Wendell gives the heroes his signature, and they can either go investigate more about Hollenbachs in the Von Speier library (not that they need to) or go talk to Lucas. They elect for Lucas.

Our heroes have found the information they need to confront Lucas. They don't necessarily know he killed Caspar (though it's a pretty good guess, given they were seen together regularly, had business together, and Lucas seems to be behind whatever's going on) but if they accuse him of it he admits it. Lucas gives them a sob story about how his brother will die to the vampire, sure, but how many dozens of people will live better under him as the kind and just ruler of Pfeifeldorf now? Is one death not worth that? If they say 'gently caress it, we don't care', Lucas lets his brother get eaten, Wilhelm the Vampire gets abducted off screen and dragged off to be a macguffin, and the PCs get to leave. Though Lucas wants to show he's 'not scared of them' and so has the 30 armed men run them out of town, shooting crossbows at them. So yeah. If they didn't discover everything, or say they should deal with the vampire, Lucas hits on the next phase of his plan: Go rescue his brother, implicate him in the 'Blood Cult' as planned, rule the town, but not let Lennhardt die. And send the PCs and some of the 30 Armed Men in front of him to die to the vampire to achieve it. It's moral, he thinks! There is no option to, say, turn Lucas in and tell everyone he made a deal with a vampire to murder his brother or something. Unless the GM decides Lucas dies during the narrative part of the big battle, Lucas always gets everything he wants, Lennhardt almost certainly dies, and...you're kind of expected to think Lucas is a morally conflicted and complex character. Also keep in mind this is the first time the PCs have ever met Lucas, and they never actually speak to Lennhardt at all.

To me? He's a sociopath. He casually strangled a man to death and hung him to look like a suicide. He's unwilling to let his ambitions go and is happy to get more people killed to be 'town hero' and try to 'save' his brother, only to have him disgraced and turned over to Hunters anyway. His whole 'dramatic come clean' moment reads more as a psychopath trying to maneuver his way out of being unmasked and caught in the middle of his intrigues.

Anyway, our heroes are up for fighting a vampire to protect the town from vampires, especially if they have a bunch of backup. They make plans to deal with Lucas later, especially as '10 GC a person' is really not enough to fight a loving Blood Dragon. Keep in mind this is a party on 300 EXP. They've just started, and have pretty basic gear, mostly their starting abilities, etc. Just...remember that during this section. They get Arnolt, Wendoll, the Bailiff, 2 unnamed members of the 30 Armed Men (guess who dies in a cutscene), and Lucas and head into the family tomb to hunt the vamp. They find him having mostly eaten Lennhardt. Wilhelm Hollenbach realizes what's what, and just kinda sighs. "Oh, so I'm being betrayed. Very well. Do you really want to do this?" asks the WS 68, Damage 7, Attacks 3, Unstoppable Blows, 22 Wound, Somehow 1 Fate Point (despite Vampires' entire thing about having no Fate), DR 10-11 Vampire (he's AV 4 limbs, 3 elsewhere; his armor's damaged). While somehow raising 8 zombies from the tomb that he can't actually raise because as a Blood Dragon he doesn't actually have the skills necessary to use magic. If the PCs freeze up or fail Fear tests, he cutscene-kills the two unnamed soldiers and takes up their swords; otherwise he's unarmed, but that really only means he can't free parry. Wilhelm is actually only trying to get away; he's not out to kill everyone here and is just trying to press through and escape the betrayal. The fight 'lasts until he or a PC takes a crit'. This is why he has the Fate Point, so he can't possibly die even if their one crit on him is a lucky kill shot. Because now he gets inevitably kidnapped as 8 Strigoi arrive on the scene. Yes, they're just thralls. But they're Damage 6, 2 attack, WS 59 Thralls. With 24 wounds each. Four attack Wilhelm, 4 attack the PCs, and they fight for 3 rounds until they can carry Wilhelm off. Again: You are 300 or so EXP 1st tier PCs. You are now facing odds that would make the loving Vampire and Chaos Lord PCs I've played falter a little. Also note: The PCs can have garlic for this fight, and silver daggers. Silver daggers do jack and poo poo; silver makes a weapon do +3 Wounds if it wounds on a vulnerable vamp, but daggers do 3 less wounds than swords anyway. No vampire has their specific weaknesses listed here, and the 'general' vampire weaknesses traits in the back of the book they all have don't have them vulnerable to garlic. So your preparations don't matter and you can't even the odds by hitting weaknesses.

The 'Strigoi are not trying to kill everyone', the book says, but 4 enemies that hit that hard, that often, and with that level of skill that the PCs just can't really beat are going to gently caress them, hard. So you go and fight the extremely dangerous (though probably beatable through sheer numbers) boss vampire, and then immediately have any accomplishment taken away by him being kidnapped and you getting the poo poo kicked out of you in an unwinnable cutscene-like fight. The GM also decides which NPCs live and die in this mess. Oh, and if somehow Wilhelm is not kidnapped, it doesn't matter; the enemies just find another Blood Dragon for their ritual. So the insistence on how inevitable his spiriting-away is is a little bizarre. And since no-one lands the killing blow on Wil, no-one gets the 50 GC bounty for him, just the 10 you were promised for showing up. Nothing you do in this finale matters in the slightest, everything is decided by the GM. You can save Lennhardt if you reach him within a round and heal him with Heal-10, but this doesn't matter as he gets implicated as the vampire's pawn anyway and probably later burned at the stake. If the GM doesn't decide Lucas dies, Lucas gets to rule the town and you probably get run out on a rail if you knew he was a piece of poo poo.

If you refused to do any of this, you instead get attacked by 12 Strigoi out in the town, but at least Lucas dies. The encounter is designed to take Fate off you for not playing along or not going along with the 'fight the vampire' party. Yay. Magically, there are more Strigoi if they need to be punishment Strigoi.

Another thing to think about, and the take I'd run if I was going for 'dark, lovely people world': Hollenbach hasn't really done that much. He was coerced into killing Lennhardt for Lucas, who intended to betray and kill him anyway. He didn't have a lot of choice, being seriously wounded. It'd be kind of fun to drag Lucas in there, offer to help the vampire instead, and get a Blood Dragon in your debt while cutting the lovely would-be town hero down. A Dragon thinking he owes you is a sure path to further complications, everything being on fire, and crazy adventures later. And it's not like Hollenbach escaping would set the enemy's plans back any. The other thing I note is the Strigoi Swarm is A: Exactly how not to use Vampires, Vampires should almost never just be nameless lovely mooks and B: If you want a swarm of dangerous enemies associated with Strigoi, just use the loving ghouls, man! The ghouls! They're still dangerous to early PCs! Strigoi have lots of them! Strigoi are too cool to be relegated to a swarm of feral, stupid Chaos dupes, goddamnit. The whole point of their line is they look like terrifying sewer monsters and are huge and have huge claws, but they're still just as intelligent as any other vamp. Tossing vamps around as mooks is both really overestimating what PCs can do, and also a complete and total waste of vampires as a villain. Faceless meatwalls are over thatway, under Chaos Warrior.

Our heroes are sadly stuck on a canon path, so they get into the fight with Wilhelm, Johan gets a serious hit that fucks his arm up (and thankfully doesn't lose it) thanks to Wilhelm being pretty goddamn dangerous depending on how much he focuses, and Katarine manages to get around the fight and save Lennhardt's life, not that it matters. During the ensuing Strigoi brawl, the two nameless NPCs and the Bailiff bite it so that the PCs aren't facing a solid wall of 4 Strigoi, they don't do much harm to the enemy vampires, and they're left bloody, battered, and lucky not to have burned fate. Sif almost loses an eye. They've got two heavily wounded PCs, there's no doctor in town besides Katarine, and they've got 10 crowns each to show for their trouble. They leave their notes with their friend Wendell, in hopes Lucas will suffer some comeuppance, and get the gently caress out of town after grabbing Syphan's book back from Johannes. They're now wounded, pissed off, and underpaid as hell.

They never did find that chicken, though. And when Lucas is deposed, Wendell Ott turns down the mayorship to give it to Nugget, the true hero whose brave faking-his-death (after going undercover as Gretta the Hen) trickery uncovered Lucas's dark schemes. Pfeildorf hails its new, hands-off (wings off?) chicken overlord, Wendell eventually gets over his depression enough to take over as Nugget's 'steward', and the town eventually does fine.

Jesus, gently caress this adventure. I'm pretty sure an awful lot of Thousand Thrones campaigns end right after the climax of this one, as the players revolt. But our heroes will soldier on, into an adventure with an excellent pitch that does absolutely nothing with it as they come to an abandoned coaching inn in the Drakwald Forest.

Before they do, they have a brief suggested Random Encounter, before any of the potential bullshit ones: They pass by a party of an elven noblewoman, an Imperial protagonist, a Kislevite peasant, a dwarf runesmith, and a Bretonnian tomb robber archeologist, leading a party of refugees to Middenheim and bearing an ancient Icon of Sigmar. The two passing parties nod to each other, recognizing a strange kinship in how both will soon be waylaid by jackassery. Yes, one of the flavor encounters is passing a PC party off to the Paths of the Damned opening, so the Thousand Crowns and Brute Squad just passed in the night.

Brute Squad has it way better. They have no idea what a lovely fate they avoided by not being in the campaign that is ALL written like Forges of Nuln.

I apologize for the double wall of text, I just really, really wanted to get the lovely Chicken And Vampire Railroad written up all at once, to have it done with. There will be adventures and parts I hate more than this one, but by god, does this ever get at the spirit of why this campaign loving sucks. I don't think I've reviewed something I found as instructively bad as this since AdEva. This entire adventure is a long series of How Not To Run A WHFRP Adventure, from the linear fetch quests to the railroading to the climax where nothing you do matters at all, the GM decides all the outcomes, and you just get hosed up for no reason with no recourse.

Next Time: The Drakwald

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Apr 13, 2020

megane
Jun 20, 2008



I'm sure Mayor Nugget will do a great job, despite having nearly-illegible handwriting and a history of calling for war while refusing to join the military.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

To the person who said they ran this, how far did you get? Did you actually get all the way to the end? I kind of imagine most attempts to run Thousand Thrones don't make it all the way to the hellwomb before people get bored, annoyed, or just change the story enough that they're doing their own thing at that point.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
Yeah, I'd say have a strigoi and some ghouls show up, ghouls dive on the NPC's, strigoi goes for the blood dragon. If the PC's help out the dragon(who will win), or at least tries to, he will owe them a debt of honourable gratitude.

Hell, make the Blood Dragon the new mayor. I'm sure he'd do a great job.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Do not, under any circumstances, give Blood Dragons positions of civil authority. The consequences will be funny, but also kill dozens to hundreds of people. At best you get a town in perpetual, terrifying training montage. At worst, boredom.

The thing that bugs me is I can't tell if Schwalb knows what makes an encounter insanely dangerous and does it on purpose, or doesn't quite realize that 'four to six skilled enemies who hit hard and have multiple attacks' (or more) is the most dangerous thing in the game. Especially if they have decent defenses (the Strigoi have Dodge and a 50+ Agi, which counts). This is how you get situations where, say, a hero who participated in killing the first Chaos Dragon Galrauch and who has 3 attacks, magic, and a bunch of other bullshit is still afraid of 10 State Troopers with rifles in one of my other games. Number of attacks, weight of fire, ability to get around defenses, etc are much more dangerous than fighting a single big enemy. This is always true. 10 reasonably well trained soldiers with WS 40+, 2 attacks, Strike Mighty, and some decent gear will threaten anyone who doesn't have truly unreasonable toughness.

There will be one random encounter where players have a possibility of fighting effectively 12 of the knights from the end of Ashes of Middenheim, that seems to anticipate they will manage to kill 5 of them to make the others retreat. I just don't quite get it. Note this occurs when the PCs are at the beginning/middle of 2nd tier, too. About 1500 EXP.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Apr 13, 2020

ChaseSP
Mar 25, 2013



Sometimes the literal bloodsucker is better than the proverbial one.

By popular demand
Jul 17, 2007
Probation
Can't post for 22 hours!
All aboard the train to bulshiton, where everyone is a dick to you for no good reason. Including the laws of probability.
I've been to several game groups who if this was the game could not possibly go through the first session before razing the town and maybe giving Chaos a try.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
There is such a thing as good railroading. As the advice I've heard goes, people really won't mind being railroaded if the scenery is nice, the destination is exciting, and they can get off at scheduled stops to explore.

This, however, is the bad kind of railroading, where there's a very specific order of things you are expected to do and the DM is instructed to cudgel the party into following the script to the letter.

By popular demand
Jul 17, 2007
Probation
Can't post for 22 hours!
The vampire behavioural correction enforcers encounter in particular is straight up insecure nerdy teenager who doesn't even like or want to GM kinda move.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Interestingly, if you did what the one poster suggested and had the chiken be the mayor via technicality to enable tax fraud, you'd actually have a motive pointing to Lucas/the Von Speiers in general. They're the ones who'd get the taxes if Nugget was out of the way. Catching the villain because he took the time to kill a local tax fraud mascot in his overreaching plans but was one of the choices of 'did Nugget have enemies' would be fun!

And as a friend said, why is this even so railroaded? No outcome here matters to the overall campaign, why not let the players just do whatevs? It's weird, but this whole campaign is extremely controlling. This is because it's the kind of campaign that gets people to stop engaging in good faith; I'll put up with some railroad/guardrails if my GM says 'hey, the plot is here' because I know the plots are usually fair, fun, and cool stuff happens. Players play along when they know playing along is usually a good time; when it's like this, they don't.

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal

Night10194 posted:

Do not, under any circumstances, give Blood Dragons positions of civil authority. The consequences will be funny, but also kill dozens to hundreds of people. At best you get a town in perpetual, terrifying training montage. At worst, boredom.

The thing that bugs me is I can't tell if Schwalb knows what makes an encounter insanely dangerous and does it on purpose, or doesn't quite realize that 'four to six skilled enemies who hit hard and have multiple attacks' (or more) is the most dangerous thing in the game. Especially if they have decent defenses (the Strigoi have Dodge and a 50+ Agi, which counts). This is how you get situations where, say, a hero who participated in killing the first Chaos Dragon Galrauch and who has 3 attacks, magic, and a bunch of other bullshit is still afraid of 10 State Troopers with rifles in one of my other games. Number of attacks, weight of fire, ability to get around defenses, etc are much more dangerous than fighting a single big enemy. This is always true. 10 reasonably well trained soldiers with WS 40+, 2 attacks, Strike Mighty, and some decent gear will threaten anyone who doesn't have truly unreasonable toughness.

There will be one random encounter where players have a possibility of fighting effectively 12 of the knights from the end of Ashes of Middenheim, that seems to anticipate they will manage to kill 5 of them to make the others retreat. I just don't quite get it. Note this occurs when the PCs are at the beginning/middle of 2nd tier, too. About 1500 EXP.

judging from shadow of the demon lord the guys not great at writing balanced adventures in general

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

This is also why Sif is important: Keep in mind Sif isn't just a competent fighter. For hand to hand combat, by her level, etc? She is genuinely exceptional. She's well above average in S and T thanks to her mutation and its lucky roll, she's tough as hell, and her base WS of 38+rolling Warrior Born make her very skilled. When I say Sif gets her rear end kicked in this campaign, keep in mind that you're only meant to have one Warrior from the way the roles divide up and consider how much worse a team that started with like an average Militiaman is going to be doing. Most parties will not have a warrior who fights like a Children of the Horned Rat Stormvermin.

Also weird is how little Shanna had to do in that adventure. You'd think an investigation would be a good place for a thief, but no.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Apr 13, 2020

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

megane posted:

I'm sure Mayor Nugget will do a great job, despite having nearly-illegible handwriting and a history of calling for war while refusing to join the military.

"The mayor's a chicken! A chicken, I tell you!"

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I should note also, Unquiet Place is one of the adventures that Schwalb has no actual writing credit on, though he's still the overall editor and director. He's credited on every other adventure on the book, but Chiken Attack is 'solely' Chuck Morrison who I don't remember doing anything else in WHFRP. Schwalb is on most of them, and is the overall primary author and editor/designer for the campaign, but cannot be fully blamed for chicken adventure.

He can be fully blamed for Hellwomb, though. I am partly writing this adventure up just to get to how bullshit/dull the final dungeon crawl is.

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!




While there’s technically seven new locations the missing gear unlocks, two of them are detailed as chapters in their own right: Sydon’s tower of Praxys, and Charybdis whose abyssal maw serves as a portal to the Nether Sea. The wide open oceans extend over a thousand miles around Thylea in all directions, which is where Sydon’s power is strongest. Few sailors dare go farther and risk the sea god’s wrath. The Lord of Storms’ presence is felt during voyages to and from the islands in this chapter, with powerful waves and frequent rain storms that never seem to end.

Bioware Trope Alert: Mobile Base of Operations: A big thank you to Weiley31 of EN World for pointing out one I somehow bypassed. In the Star Wars and Mass Effect series, you had a starship which was used to sail between planets. Your various allies and party members lived on it when not going on missions with you, and who you can talk with to pass the time. In some cases you had to defend said starship from attacks by aliens, space pirates, and other such threats. You also did not get said starships at the beginning, instead having to earn their use after completing a quest in the main plot.

Aerie of the Roc: By far the shortest entry in a relatively short chapter, this pillar-like island sports a roc’s nest on top. The mighty bird is rarely home, flying across the land to abduct food to feed to its hatchlings. The nest itself is home to six baby rocs who are dangerous in their own right, with treasure randomly-generated from the DMG table to PCs who search through the nest for the birds’ prior victims.

The Garden of Helios: This verdant island is a sheer plateau with no natural harbor, forcing the party to fly or climb in order to reach its surface. About 100 cyclops live simple lives herding elephants on the island, overseen by a self-proclaimed Sun God known as Helios. He’s made a deal with Sydon to turn the cyclops into soldiers for the eventual war, but Helios is regretting this decision as he’s come to view the cyclops as his own children.

Helios is in fact a gold dragon polymorphed into human form, and unlike others of his kind is of evil alignment. He’ll be courteous to visiting PCs, inviting them to dinner at his castle before growing bored of their conversation and deciding to have them for dinner. As this is a violation of Guest Hospitality, the Furies will dispatch three erinyes to fight alongside the party and take him to the Island of Oathbreakers unless the PCs kill him quickly enough.

Amusingly the text discusses how Helios is in fact a false god, using a magical flying chariot in his treasure hoard to add to the illusion. But in the Introduction chapter we see him listed as a god who can grant the Wealth domain to Clerics. The book never elaborates on how he’s able to do this.

Epic Path: Helios’ treasure hoard contains Daern’s Instant Fortress, which is what the Order of Dragonlords used as a mobile base of operations. Appropriately enough it has dragon-themed artwork and motifs in its construction.

This is also the “endgame” portion of the Dragonslayer’s quest. Helios will gleefully tell said PC of how a prophecy foretold that someone among the PC’s village would kill them. He focuses all of his attacks on the Dragonslayer during the battle.

Island of the Dragon: This tropical island is covered in thick jungle and lagoons. The green dragon Hexia is its uncontested ruler, and several tribes of elves live in fear of her. The dragon’s nature-themed spells turn the very wildlife into her spies, and unless the PCs take pains to mask their every move she will soon learn of the Ultros’ docking. She used to be one of Pythor’s lovers, but grew jealous that she could not have him to herself and so killed many of his trysts over the years. While the PCs are exploring the island, she’ll kidnap Pythor to take back to her cave.

The Kraken also makes its lair in a cave deep beneath the island and is home to many treasures. PCs can find an Orb of Dragonkind, 1 million gold pieces worth of minable silver, and randomly-determined DMG loot from one of the higher tables (CR 11 to 16), but there’s a greater chance the Kraken will return the longer the PCs linger. The pressure this deep is so great that only magic such as Freedom of Movement or dive suits built by the God of the Forge can protect against constant bludgeoning damage.

Epic Paths: This is the Demi-God’s ‘endgame’ quest for the purposes of gaining the Divine Blessing, although thematically their plot truly comes to an end when they save Thylea and/or become the new God of War. Their mother is a prisoner in the cave, who only managed to survive by entertaining Hexia with stores that appeal to her ego. The Demi-God’s mother knows some details of all the other islands in the Forgotten Sea, and implores the PC to “succeed where their father failed and save Thylea from the Titans.”



Typhon, the Maw: This desolate volcanic island has jagged rock surrounding its shores, and sailors rightly avoid it for its reputation of being the original home of many of the world’s monsters. A volcano known as the Maw is the central feature, and in order to get there the PCs must pass through several monster-filled caves. Most of said monsters are fiends and nothing special, although one encounter is a very blatant case of the writers being Horny on Main:

TW: Sexual Assault

Quote: Moans and screams can be heard from within this cave mouth, growing louder as you move inside.

After a few minutes of walking, you come to a large, dimly-lit cavern. There, a man with the legs of a goat and great black curved horns reclines on a rocky throne. In his hands he holds an ornate gold scepter, which he fondles as he gazes at the spectacle at his feet: a wine-soaked bacchanal of revelers indulging their carnal passions.


The scepter-bearing satyr is actually an incubus using a Rod of Rulership to force captives to have sex with each other and to fight the PCs if they try to put a stop to things. Said people are quite aware that they’re being violated; if the mental hold is broken, or they’re freed from the cages they’re kept in when the incubus is away, they will help the PCs take revenge against the incubus.


The Maw itself is a platform overlooking a deep, deep fall into the volcano’s heart. There’s a portal to Hades beneath the lava, and those who survive its deadly heat will be sucked into this dread realm. Whispers from innumerable souls fill the Maw, and PCs who manage to persist for 4 rounds by making several Wisdom saves to avoid insanity gain a randomly-determined Charm or Blessing from the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Epic Paths: This is the endgame for the Cursed One’s quest. Using the magic item from the Lotus Witch to guard against the volcano’s damage, they leap into the Maw and emerge in Hades. There they meet the ancestor responsible for their family curse, watched over by Cerberus who explains that killing them is the only way to end the curse. A PC who follows through with this ends the curse on themselves and the rest of their family/tribe/etc, awakening back on Typhon Island.



Island of Time: Everything gets trippy as the PCs approach this island. The sky above rapidly cycles between night and day, although no time is passing in the wider world beyond. The stars in the night sky wink out of existence while others take their place just as rapidly, and those exploring the island experience several fugue states where they experience encounters as a series of montage events. The Island is the home of sphinxes, who have a special relationship with the concept of time in this setting. An androsphinx rules the island, and will roar once for every encounter area the PCs visit. By the third roar they are no longer welcome on the island and he will arrive to fight them; the warning roars are explained by a gynosphinx resident, so the PCs know they have a limit.

While here, the PCs can find a treasure vault containing Arrows of Empyrean* Slaying which are keyed to be effective against gods, Titans, and their children. A dinner party of long-haired old figures who’ve been here for eternity and can only be awakened by the androsphinx. There’s also a telescope which shows the future of the City of Mytros by a magnitude of ten each time it’s viewed, showing a world less familiar and more alien every time until it goes dark by a million years.

*Empyreans in Odyssey are different than their Monster Manual counterparts. Their alignment can differ more, they are explicitly the children of a god, and have use of said parent’s divine Domain.

Should the PCs risk the androsphinx’s wrath, he’ll teleport them to the Far Realm, an alien expanse of gigantic stretched faces making up the landscape while a black moon in the sky bleeds waterfalls of blood. The sphinx will spare the PCs should they answer one correct riddle per party member if they lose or surrender, and invite them to the dinner party where they gain the benefits of a Heroes’ Feast.

Thoughts So Far: This was a pretty short section, although it’s quite clear that the locations are meant to serve as endgames for several Epic Paths. I feel that Helios’ actions in violating guest hospitality are a bit too stupid for what should be a PC’s archenemy, and unlike other villains or notable NPCs they don’t really have prior interactions with the party to build a kind of proper relationship. I really liked the ambient creepiness of the Island of Time, but I felt that the Island of Typhon and its Cursed One resolution to be underwhelming. To say nothing of the incubus’ magically-coerced orgy.

Join us next time as we sail into Charybdis’ maw and enter the Nether Sea!

Libertad! fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Apr 14, 2020

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Wrestlepig posted:

judging from shadow of the demon lord the guys not great at writing balanced adventures in general

Probably because he's learned he has to use the Big Stick, not realising why his parties keep needing it. This is a shame as I had heard SotDL was an excellent Diablo-toned game, provided you watched out for a lot of scatological humour. For some reason there's a bit on a derelict spaceship?

That said the way we're supposed to feel sorry for the poor town psychopath sets off all kinds of creep alarms in my head. Not sure I'd want to meet the author in person.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

They present it as Lucas feeling really guilty about all his plans, which I'd buy if like...he pleaded with the PCs to help him save his brother and gave up his scheme and admitted he was terrified of the vamp and didn't think he could stop. The fact that he insists he'll only do it if he still gets everything he wants (combined with the fact that strangling someone to death, then noosing them to cover it up feels like a pretty psycho way of doing things) is what marks him as a sociopath trying to manipulate the PC to me.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Selachian posted:

"The mayor's a chicken! A chicken, I tell you!"
you wear a disguise
to fool the Chaos guys
but you're just not Khorne
You're a chicken, boo

Jerik
Jun 24, 2019

I don't know what to write here.

Libertad! posted:

*Empyreals are a new monster type in this book. They’re like Monster Manual Titans in being huge and divinely-powered, but are explicitly the children of a god and have use of said parent’s divine Domain.

There are no Monster Manual Titans in 5E. Or rather, "titan" is not the name of a particular monster, but a tag given to several very powerful monsters, including the kraken and the tarrasque. The monster that was called a titan in earlier editions is in the 5E Monster Manual, but under a different name: specifically, "Empyrean". So if Odyssey of the Dragonlords calls its variant titans "Empyreals" that... could get a little confusing. (From your description, the OotD Empyreals are different from the Monster Manual Empyreans, since the latter don't have divine Domains, but it seems odd to give them almost the same name.)

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!

Jerik posted:

There are no Monster Manual Titans in 5E. Or rather, "titan" is not the name of a particular monster, but a tag given to several very powerful monsters, including the kraken and the tarrasque. The monster that was called a titan in earlier editions is in the 5E Monster Manual, but under a different name: specifically, "Empyrean". So if Odyssey of the Dragonlords calls its variant titans "Empyreals" that... could get a little confusing. (From your description, the OotD Empyreals are different from the Monster Manual Empyreans, since the latter don't have divine Domains, but it seems odd to give them almost the same name.)

Thank you for catching that. There's actually a one-letter difference. The new monsters in OotDL are Empyreans, while the Monster Manual creatures I'm thinking of are Empyreals.

Edit: Brain fart. Both monsters actually have the same names, which likely means that OotDL Empyreans are the souped-up kind.

Libertad! fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Apr 14, 2020

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012



Spectaculars is a supers RPG by Rodney Thompson's Scratchpad Publishing. It's a lightweight system that emphasizes casual drop-in play, with fast character creation, minimal GM prep, and short scenarios that can be resolved in a single session. In this, it's very similar to Scratchpad's Dusk City Outlaws.

Spectaculars comes in a big heavy (and, at $75, expensive) box containing:

- six character trays, which are quite nicely designed and hold all the sheets and cards you'll need for your character
- one sheet of punch-out markers
- a whole lot of cards
- a bag of dice
- five pads: one pad of character record sheets and four series pads (Explorers of the Unknown, Eldritch Mysteries, Streetlight Knights, and Clash Among the Stars)
- two 60-page booklets, the Rule Book and the Setting Book

To start playing, you pick one of the series pads. Explorers of the Unknown is traditional four-color superheroing in the Avengers/JLA/Fantastic Four style, with an emphasis on high-tech villains, Eldritch Mysteries is magic-powered supers, Streetlight Knights is street-level crimebusting, and Clash Among the Stars is for space-based heroes like the Guardians or the Green Lanterns.

The first couple pages of the series pad are team options. Players choose one and fill out checklists -- this game has a lot of checklists -- to determine the team's backstory, how they got together, what sort of resources they have, and such. For example, the options for a Streetlight Knights series are Wards & Mentors (everyone on the team was recruited and/or trained by the same person, such as the Bat Family, or Team Arrow) or Neighborhood Watch (the team has come together to clean up their part of the city, like the Netflix Defenders or the Birds of Prey). These sheets are used to track who's a member of the team, as well as the team's reputation in three areas (Public, Media, and Government).

Next on the series pad are six Archetype sheets. Each Archetype sheet offers checklists for the character's origin, vulnerability, Resistance (see below), and how they get around the city -- i.e., whether they use their powers, have a swing line, have a vehicle like the Blackbird or a Quinjet, or whatever. The Getting Around entry is meant mostly to establish how your character arrives on the scene -- it's not meant to substitute for actually having powers like Flight or Teleportation, and it's up to the narrator to enforce the difference. Each Archetype also has a special ability to set it apart from the others., and a list of potential personality traits to choose from.

Most Archetypes have 100 Resistance (hit points), but it's up to the player to define what form their Resistance takes: it could be a force field, armor, ability to dodge, or sheer willpower and toughness. The fact that a spandex-clad Vigilante and a steel-encased Power Armor Pilot have the same Resistance may give simulationists hives, although powers like Armor or Super Toughness can also play a role in how long you can stay in a fight. At 0 Resistance, you're out of the fight, but all Resistance is recovered at the end of each fight.

Here's an example of an Archetype sheet, the Avatar from Eldritch Mysteries (front and back). Note that every hero and villain Archetype has several examples of "real" comics characters that fit that Archetype, which can be handy when figuring out what you want to play.

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant
I may chime in more tomorrow, but I just want to say before bed: Spectaculars is one of the best role playing experiences I've had in twenty years of RPGing. I did an exhaustive WIR over on RPG.net, I wrote a pretty slick (if I do say so myself) Discord bot that handles all the cards, and even still, I can't stop thinking about it. It's really amazing at what it strives for.

tankfish
May 31, 2013

Night10194 posted:

To the person who said they ran this, how far did you get? Did you actually get all the way to the end? I kind of imagine most attempts to run Thousand Thrones don't make it all the way to the hellwomb before people get bored, annoyed, or just change the story enough that they're doing their own thing at that point.

Basically I ended up having to rewrite the early stuff which made it a completely different campaign. My group never finished the story because of life reasons. I had the blood dragon makes Lucas duel my partys fighter character in "honorable" combat for the fate of the village. Lucas loses and the vamp keeps his word and leaves. The village has a festival crowning Nugget the 8th. I gave my players half of the bounty and whatever equipment Lucas had.

tankfish fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Apr 14, 2020

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
That which is Euro can eternal lie, and in the endless months even JcDent may receive a private message from a Degenesis review reader.

:black101: Chapter 7: Battle, pt. 1 :black101:



Degenesis Rebirth
Katharsys
Chapter 7: Battle


It's tiiiime to...du- du- du- beat up Apocalyptics!

Death Is Part Of The Game

Combat is a thing in Degenesis and this section is about it.

A Quick Glance

Did you know that Skills and Attributes matter in combat?

Combat Skills and Their Counterparts

You use a certain combat skill to do battle. You may also use a certain skill to defend.

You beat people up with BOD+Brawl/Melee (depending on whether you have a weapon) and oppose it... with BOD+Brawl/Melee. For shooting, it's AGI+Projectiles vs. AGI+Mobility.

Now, you may argue that AGI+Mobility should also work for melee, but that would turn into FFG's Dodge The Defense God-Stat. You can also argue that you need to know when and how to disengage in melee rather than just being quick.

For the less physical confrontation, it's “metal or social” vs. PSY+Faith/Willpower.

Defense

As mentioned before, the passive Defense is 1, which means an opponent needs only a single success to hit to you.

Condition

Flesh Wounds are actually subtracted before you go into Trauma. I read ahead – Trauma hurts.

Ego

Ego points can be used to buy benefits, but they're also brain HP. If they run out, your char passes out from exhaustion or something.

Visualization

The game allows you to choose between maps and theatre of the mind for combat. It goes into a bit more detail than this, on the off-chance that Degenesis is your Babby's First Elfgame.


I'm visualizing... horses!

The Battle

A battle rounds in Degenesis start with initiative rolls. Everyone acts on their turn, then a new round and a new set of initiative rolls begins. A turn is supposed to last about 4 seconds in game time.

Initiative

But wait! If you want to, you can either overtly or covertly (...I guess if you're engaging in PvP) spend up to 3 Ego points (or more, Potentials permitting) when rolling Init. Everyone then rolls PSY+Reaction, with successes counting as their initiative score. You add the Ego points to that total. Those Ego points also add +1D per Point to the first action you do.

Triggers are super special here, as every 2 Triggers give you an additional action in your turn. So this is moving towards the terrible thing of breaking action economy, but at least your Ego bonuses don't boost the amount of dice you roll for PSY+Reaction, nor do they count towards Triggers. Of course, people with high PSY+Reaction will usually get more triggers and more actions.

Oh, and if you score no successes, you get one action at Init 0.

Math nerds, hash this one out.

If you remember FnF's own Johann the Spitalian, I didn't invest anything into Reaction, so he's going to be rolling 2 dice for his Psyche of 2.

One After The Other

So once you have rolled Init, players act on it in a descending order. Ties occur simultaneously, with effects only applying after the end of Init step, which means that you can, say, resolve a Mexican standoff in a mutually deadly fashion.

It's Your Turn!

You will have at last one action per turn. If you have more actions due to Triggers, you'll have to carry them out immediately after the first – that's their way of saying that you can't split it over several Init steps.

Free actions

Shouting, taunting enemies, dropping weapons and other boring actions are free. Degenesis doesn't tell the GM to adjudicate whether the amount of free actions fit the 4 sec window. If you so desire, you can have that comic book battle banter.

Movement

Movement is a free action! And if you move more than 2 meters, you get -2D to your actions, but +1 to defense.

Oh, maximum move distance? BOD+Athletics meters. Could have been useful to know this earlier.

Incidentally, Johann gets 2 meters of movement.

Some fuckers out there will be covering 12 meters in 4 seconds, the realism of which I can't gauge because time and distance are both meaningless to me.

Potentialy Deadly

Side-section! Fighting in Degenesis is deadly.

quote:

In the KatharSys, weapons are violent tools that kill with 2-3 hits.

The game advises fighting dirty or running.

Which is... I dunno, I can't really do maths, not when we haven't seen weapon stats or opponents yet, but seeing how long, purposeful and unwieldy character creation is in the game, seems kinda bad. Though who knows, maybe the pre-made adventures will have many paths for avoiding battles/winning them through cheating and fuckery.

Next time: OK, so maybe there is One Trick To Defense in Degenesis after all

megane
Jun 20, 2008



Interesting how the systems that crow about how "lethal"* their combat is are always the ones with the longest, most over-complicated character creation.

* read: you die to two bad die rolls from a trash enemy they expect you to fight eight of at once.

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012


For Gold & Glory #18: Appendix B, part I: Mundane Treasure

This first part's short since it's only about money and things you can easily exchange for money.

Cash rules everywhere around me

The core of this whole appendix are a pair of somewhat arcane-looking tables:




The first table runs A–I, the second J–Z, so there are a bunch of rows in these. All monsters in the bestiary have in their statblock a "Treasure" line that may contain some of these letters. For every letter, the GM should roll all the dice on the row to figure out what kind of treasure the monster is either carrying or has stashed in its lair. A percentage chance is often included to indicate the likelihood of encountering any treasure of that particular type.

For example! Halflings own treasure of both B and K types. Therefore, when our brave heroes bust the gate to the Halfing Warrens, kill the gang of 2d6 ferocious little monsters patrolling the corridors and rifle through their pockets, they'll find 3d6 silver pieces from row K. Once our heroes find the halflings' storeroom and sleeping quarters, they might find all kinds of stuff from row B, such as 1d4 random commodities, 1d8 gemstones or even a magical weapon of some kind! However, all of row B's entries come with percentage chances, so our heroes are unlikely to find something from every column, and might miss out on treasure altogether.

After that's done, the GM then has to figure out what specific kind of commodities, gemstones or magic items the players find. First he picks some arbitrary commodities from the equipment chapter or the tables in the appendix, then rolls on the gem value table to figure out the base value of the found stones, then on the gem value variation table if the gems are cut (who decides if the gems are cut? The GM, obviously), and then rolls on more tables to figure out what kind of weapon it is and how is it enchanted. And then probably decides it's a halfling-sized weapon, so good luck with that, heroes.

In case you're wondering why there are separate columns for different kinds of coins, remember that 50 coins of any kind weigh one pound.


Edwaert Colyer: Vanitas Still Life, detail. 1693.


Get the money

There are so many tables in this appendix, and I'm simultaneously already done with it and left wanting more.

Done with it, because this is an absolute dog of a chapter to say anything about and honestly not laid out very clearly. The table for objects of art is placed two paragraphs after the actual text that refers to it, and the table for those in-between paragraphs is over on the next page. Some tables are meant to be rolled on, some are just for reference, others are just add-ons to the completely useless ones I complained about back when I did the chapter on equipment.

Yet I'm also left wanting more, because I genuinely like it when a game gives a GM tools like this. What's in the dungeon? Well uh :rolldice: halflings, uhm, :rolldice: 23 of them, they've got, umm :rolldice: three camels, a painting of a naked dude, and a magical pair of shoes. This part of the appendix would be a lot better if it went the distance and had proper random tables for absolutely everything you might find so that the GM wouldn't have to think too much. If I ran D&D regularly oh man I would do nothing but wacky random crap like that.

Incidentally there are no guidelines for anything in this part, beyond encouraging the GM to roll for treasure in advance so that they can place it sensibly and prepare some descriptions. There's no consideration for questions such as "how much money is too little/not enough" or "how do you actually turn fancy clothes into money".


Coming up next: Appendix B, part II: Magical items!

Memnaelar
Feb 21, 2013

WHO is the goodest girl?

JcDent posted:

That which is Euro can eternal lie, and in the endless months even JcDent may receive a private message from a Degenesis review reader.


Hooray! Now to catch up to here!

Also, to answer your math nerd question, 12 meters in 4 seconds is about 10' per second. If you math it out, that comes out to about 6.8 mph. Google tells me the average male jogger is about 8.3 mph, so seems to check out.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!




Speaking of Degenesis, they released all the books and rules for free this week.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Cooked Auto posted:

Speaking of Degenesis, they released all the books and rules for free this week.

I'm honestly tempted to give it a read myself just on the off chance that I can tease some sort of deeper meaning out of it but I'm pretty sure I'd be disappointed.

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012



Once you've picked your Archetype, it's powers time. The game includes a 25-card deck of Common Powers, which can be used in any series, and a 15-card deck of powers for each series pad. The narrator (GM) shuffles the common powers and series powers together, and each player draws five powers. You can keep up to three for your character; if you keep fewer than three, you get extra Hero Points per fight (about which later).

There's also a deck of Basic Power cards. You can, if you wish, replace any of your power cards with basic powers: Flight, Super Strength, Super Toughness, Energy Blast, or Signature Weapon. Basic Powers are more one-dimensional than powers from the deck, and you get an extra Hero Point for taking one.

You then arrange your power cards in order of priority: the first power is your Superpower (80% chance of success); other powers are your Lesser Power (70%), and Minor Power (60%).

After powers comes Identities: who you really are, and what your skills are. Again, there are 25 Common Identities and 15 series-related identities for each series; the narrator shuffles the common and series identities together and each player draws three, keeping one. Each identity card has a list of skills, and some questions to use as prompts when you're writing your backstory.

To finish character creation, you select (not randomly draw) a Team Role card, which defines the main way you contribute to the team and gives you a special ability that you can invoke by spending Hero Points. If you're a Tank, you're good at taking hits; Artillery and Strikers can pile on damage; Leaders and Boosters can enhance other characters' abilities; and so on.

You get at least one Hero Point per conflict, and more if you've taken fewer than three powers or if you've switched any of your powers for a Basic Power.

Here's an example of character creation. Let's say we're playing Explorers of the Unknown and I've chosen the Construct archetype (i.e., an android, cyborg, robot, or what have you).



My power draws are:







Weather Control seems like a weird choice for a construct, but I could pair it with Super Senses: I have the power to sense and alter the local microclimate to produce freak weather at my command. Just call me … Chaos Butterfly! I'm a weather-monitoring AI that has achieved sentience and learned how to not only measure, but manipulate, the weather.

I could also take Binding if I wanted to be able to trap enemies with powerful winds or blocks of ice, or toss it in favor of Flight from the basic power deck, since it seems natural for a weather controller to be able to fly. Or I could just stick with two powers and take an extra two Hero Points.

My identity draws are:





Anyone who calls themselves Chaos Butterfly is probably flamboyant enough to be an Actor, so I'll go with that. Clearly Chaos Butterfly has been drawn to the stage as a way of experiencing as many human emotional states as possible...

On the other hand, I notice that Telcom Transmission is one of the options for Getting Around on the Construct character sheet. Hmm … Teleportation, Sound Manipulation, and maybe Super Senses – I could be the Phone Phreak instead! Or I could go with Binding, Super Senses, and Super Strength from the Basic Powers deck and be a knockoff Spider-Man.

Okay, you got any better ideas? No, seriously, if you can come up with something better based on those draws, I'd love to hear it.

Backstory can wait – Spectaculars wants to keep character creation simple so you can jump into play quickly, so it recommends not getting too tied up into origins and such until after you play the first issue.

You may notice that the power cards only give the broadest description of each power, without any definite benchmarks. Spectaculars doesn't really care about setting numerical limits on powers; it's up to the player and narrator to define what a character can do with their powers. Signature Weapon, for instance, can cover anything from batarangs or Daredevil's billy club to Mjolnir. The series you're playing can also help define your powers as well. In a Streetlight Knights series, someone with Super Strength might be closer to Jessica Jones or Thunder from Black Lightning, but in an Explorers of the Unknown game, Super Strength might be on the level of Wonder Woman or the Thing. This level of abstraction isn't for every group, but if you're used to lighter supers games like Masks, you can probably make it work.

While this method of character creation is fast and surprisingly fun, sometimes you do get a draw that just doesn't make sense for your Archetype, or doesn't inspire any ideas. And there are some corner cases – what if your Power Armor Pilot doesn't draw the Armor power, or your Speedster doesn't get Super Speed? It does require some flexibility on the narrator's part, and it's an optional rule to do away with random draws and just allow the player to pick the powers they want. I enjoy the random aspect – I find it can prompt interesting ideas that I normally wouldn't have thought of – but random, or even semi-random, supers generation isn't for everyone.

Also, Spectaculars doesn't expect you to play the same character for an entire campaign. If your character turns out to be a dud, you can always create a new one next session, or bring back an old one that no one's using.

Swollen Member
Aug 4, 2019

You know you want it...

Midjack posted:

So you want to poo poo your pants at Gencon?

I don't want to poo poo my pants, but if it had to happen...

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

PurpleXVI posted:

I'm honestly tempted to give it a read myself just on the off chance that I can tease some sort of deeper meaning out of it but I'm pretty sure I'd be disappointed.

Do it for the sake of looking at pretty art/stealing it as assets for the next roll20 post apoc game you run:
https://degenesis.com/downloads/books/

Pls no spoilers for the stuff I haven't covered yet, though Primal Punk and Katharsys up to battle are fair game. They're supposed to be in the Degenesis: Rebirth download I linked.

The 720 pages one.

I'm at page 100ish (of 358) of the Katharsys book :smithicide:

And yes, it was forum poster Memnaelar that brought the free RBs to my attention.

grassy gnoll
Aug 27, 2006

The pawsting business is tough work.

Selachian posted:

Weather Control seems like a weird choice for a construct, but I could pair it with Super Senses: I have the power to sense and alter the local microclimate to produce freak weather at my command. Just call me … Chaos Butterfly! I'm a weather-monitoring AI that has achieved sentience and learned how to not only measure, but manipulate, the weather.

It wouldn't be a supers game if it didn't feature the writers' favorites tucked into the rules with the serial filed off. In this case, the Red Tornado.

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant

Selachian posted:

To finish character creation, you select (not randomly draw) a Team Role card, which defines the main way you contribute to the team and gives you a special ability that you can invoke by spending Hero Points. If you're a Tank, you're good at taking hits; Artillery and Strikers can pile on damage; Leaders and Boosters can enhance other characters' abilities; and so on.

One thing to note is that the Team Role card is reselected every time you use the character. So, just like sometimes Iron Man is the Blaster and sometimes they're the Leader, Spectaculars characters have different roles depending on team composition.

Selachian posted:

Backstory can wait – Spectaculars wants to keep character creation simple so you can jump into play quickly, so it recommends not getting too tied up into origins and such until after you play the first issue.

And in fact explicitly tells you not to do it until the end of the character's first session.

Selachian posted:

While this method of character creation is fast and surprisingly fun, sometimes you do get a draw that just doesn't make sense for your Archetype, or doesn't inspire any ideas. And there are some corner cases – what if your Power Armor Pilot doesn't draw the Armor power, or your Speedster doesn't get Super Speed? It does require some flexibility on the narrator's part, and it's an optional rule to do away with random draws and just allow the player to pick the powers they want. I enjoy the random aspect – I find it can prompt interesting ideas that I normally wouldn't have thought of – but random, or even semi-random, supers generation isn't for everyone.

Selachian posted:

The Speedster without super speed is the same wonkiness I called out in my write up! One of my players pointed out that being a Speedster doesn't necessarily mean running fast, and we talked about that Speedster as a Sherlock Holmes type who could do calculations in their head super fast.

Not just a dud, but also, maybe not appropriate for this adventure, or, a crossover!

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones

A nice walk, spoiled

Bookkeeping first: Everyone has a little money, but nowhere to spend it, so gear doesn't change any. With the customary 300 EXP, Sif picks up 2 Wounds and 5 Agi, in hopes she won't get so hosed up in the next fights. Katarine got a lot of practice keeping Sif and Johan from losing bits, so she buys +10 Int and Surgery. She's now a competent doctor! It only took one extremely stressful set of emergency treatments performed under fire by multiple vampires for her to unlock her healing touch. Anyone could have done that! Shanna buys +10 Fel and +5 BS, since she knows now she's going to have to do a lot of talking and there's a distressing amount of fighting in this business. Oleg similarly buffs for combat, getting +5 Str and +10 WS, and he's now almost as good at fighting as Sif for now (if you ignore the lack of Strike Mighty or a 2nd attack). Still, their sprinter-dwarf has a 51% WS, 43% Str, and 41% T, plus Dodge, a shield, and a good axe. He can definitely hold his own to back Sif up and either of them would body an average Beastman. That may be extremely relevant soon. Johan grabs +2 Wounds and +5 Agi in hopes he won't get his poo poo kicked in in the next big combat setpiece; he almost lost an arm, that would have sucked. Sif probably could've handled losing an eye (it would have simply made her look like a pirate, and ruined any chance she's ever decent with ranged) but a lost arm is pretty bad. Syphan picks up some Int advances (+10) and a Wound. She's really trying to study better.

Now more powerful, the most important thing is that Katarine can heal people for 2 wounds a day even if they're terribly wounded, or d10 wounds a day if they aren't. She also has a 56% Heal skill. Note two of the characters would have died of bleedout (well, burned Fate) with no remedy if they didn't have a doctor in the party last adventure, and that they'd be beginning the next adventure with two critically wounded PCs because there's no time allotted to rest for several weeks and heal naturally. I cannot emphasize enough: You always, always want someone with at least the basic Heal skill along in any Warhams party. Given they only get two or three days between the last adventure and this one, without Katarine's healing they'd be in terrible shape for what's going to be a pretty big (but winnable, if you're in good condition) mandatory combat set-piece later. As it is, her emergency treatment during the Chicken Attack got the two people at 0 to 1, then her Surgery the next day got them to 3 (using Fortune if necessary for rerolls), then natural healing and an extra d10 (and some good luck) put Johan at full and Sif at 12. One more day on the road, and everyone was ready for action by the time they encounter the spooky deserted coaching inn.

Episode 3's opening adventure has a really strong concept that it doesn't do very well. The PCs arrive at an abandoned coaching inn, since all the staff and guards ran off to join Karl. The place still has beds and walls and defenses, and it's raining like crazy for the moment, so it's still way better than hunkering down in the Drakwald. While they're searching the place and discovering they're still stuck using their traveling rations (but at least have a roof over their heads), a fat shithead of a Sigmarite shows up with his Hammer Bearers (religious militia known for their black shirts, who also tend to be reactionary pricks so I make the connection) and his kindly initiate. Then while they're sorting that out, a band of mutants arrives, hoping to scavenge food without hurting anyone since the inn is abandoned. The PCs have to try to avoid a pointless fight with the mutants, who really don't mean any harm and are specifically trying to live without being Chaos types, while keeping the Sigmarites off their throats. Then the Beastmen arrive, besiege the inn, and the PCs have to lead two groups who hate and fear each other to work together and defeat the attackers from a fortified position in the inn so they can hold out until morning. In concept? This is a great idea! Defending coaching inns is a great combat set piece because they actually have walls and fortifications, so there's room for narrative strategy at least. And trying to force crazy Sigmarites and sane mutants to work together so everyone doesn't die in the face of Actual Chaos is a great concept for an adventure. How does it bungle this strong concept? Let's find out!

First, there's a lot of time wasting in searching the inn. Lots of Per to confirm no, there is no food, the well is dry, etc etc. Thankfully, the Thousand Crowns brought plenty of traveling rations and between Oleg, Sif, and Shanna they have a fairly easy time stretching them by Shanna (and Johan! And Katarine!) being good cooks and Oleg and Sif knowing the wilds. Ironically, the only person with absolutely no wilderness survival skills, cooking skills, etc is the elf. Searching the inn thoroughly, they accidentally find a wounded wood elf hiding under one of the beds; this is Lorinoc, our third wrinkle on the scenario. He and his came from the Athel Loren, but Beastmen killed most of his party before they could do whatever they were planning to do in the Laurelorn Forest, and now he's hiding out in the Drakwald. The poor elf is badly hurt and very skittish, but the party having an elf means he'll tell them his story about being attacked by beastmen, and with Syphan's urging, let Katarine take a look at his injuries. She heals the poor guy for 2, taking him from 2 to 4 Wounds and out of Heavily Wounded, which probably hurts his elven pride when a human is a considerably better medic than he is. He's got full stats because he can help out when fighting starts, and with his goddamn 68% BS, Elfbow, and Rapid Reload, he'll be quite an asset during the eventual siege.

They're busy trying to calm the elf down and assure him they mean no harm when a carriage arrives. There's lots of Per tests to hear the carriage and maybe shut the gates, etc etc, but they don't matter and the scenario assumes you let the carriage in. Note that if you refuse the coach entry, the Sigmarite priest goes and somehow gets tons of Warhammer Cops to come attack you, so...as per usual, play along, or else the omnipresent Warhammer Cops will get you. Gee, those guys would've been nice in the case of the adventure, wouldn't they? Sadly, they're only available to attack PCs who don't go along with railroading. Inside the carriage is Father Johannes, a 'fat, weak man who is everything Luthor Huss despises about the church'. If you ever want a wild time, go read the summary of Luthor Huss's backstory on a Warhams wiki or something; never before have I seen a character with so many 'you are supposed to love this guy and agree with him' signifiers who seemed like such a complete and utter maniac rear end in a top hat. That aside, Johannes is a lovely interrogator of the Order of the Cleansing Flame, a sadist who enjoys torturing people to death under the guise of zeal (not sure why he and Huss wouldn't get along). He's neither a good man, nor a competent man, but his family is important, so the Sigmarites can't defrock him. Instead, they eventually sent him north to investigate lunatic cults in hopes some zealot will 'unfortunately' bash his skull in. To date, this has not happened. He had 12 militia with him at first, but a few have died on the road, and most of the others stole his traveling funds and went to join one of the Valtenite heretic sects. Now he only has 2 and his young initiate.

While Johannes is an rear end in a top hat, and his two Hammer Bearers are arrogant pricks who act like they're holy knights, Initiate Nils is an earnest and decent young man. His arc throughout the campaign will be to learn he can do nothing for anyone, while he ages prematurely from stress from trying. Alternately, he can become a PC. Unfortunately for him, they picked up Katarine. Sorry, Nils. Nils believes Father Johannes is a great and important man, and doesn't realize how badly he's treated as his assistant. Nils also has batshit crazy stats IF he hasn't spent any EXP. If he has, they should really mark it, especially considering he's explicitly here to replace a dead PC if necessary. If not, he has WS 38, BS 35, S 31, T 37, Agi 37, Int 37, WP 34, and Fel 37. If those are his base stats, Nils is a goddamn genius at just about everything and rolled crazy well. If they aren't, you don't actually have the information necessary to make him a PC since you don't know which advances he's already bought. Plus, he's on the Sigmarite Priest track, and Lore of Sigmar is extremely powerful for a priest some day. Nils would be a really good addition to a team.

There are lots of ways to piss off Johannes and the Hammer Bearers and get them to run off to get the Warhammer Cops, which is weird, because the scenario absolutely requires them to be here and everything proceeds as if they are. The heroes closed the inn gates when they arrived, because they didn't want to be ambushed during the night, and doing that actually sets Johannes' people at ease since the gates are supposed to be closed. Otherwise it's Charm+10 or they're off to get the Warhammer Cops. Somehow, while they'll run off to get Cops in most scenarios, if the PCs demand payment to let them in, they'll eventually pay rather than run off, because 'they're too afraid of being trapped in the Drakwald at night'. How do they make it out to get the cops in every other scenario, then? Anyway, our heroes aren't weird dicks, so they let fellow travelers into the inn to be safer behind the walls.

Johannes arrives, demands food and a bath, etc etc. Johan is used to working in the service industry and recognizes a lovely customer who will demand to see his manager immediately, and has long experience explaining things to such people. The servant takes the front against this dread threat to the party's well being, explaining patiently that the inn was abandoned when they got there, but if the other travelers are low on supplies they'll be happy to share and that the beds and things are still in place. Syphan objects to seeing her friend yelled at and condescended to, but Johan gives her a look to say 'Trust me, it's better this way' and helps Johannes to a room, moves his trunks, and gets to work adding a few extra plates to tonight's dinner. Nils quietly apologizes for his master's behavior, telling the team it's stress. Johan knows it's just the fat priest being an rear end in a top hat, especially as his Hammer Bearers are the same; like I said, he's done this dance before. Shanna quietly suggests the priest's got a lotta juice with all the jeweled rings he's wearing, but there are no other possible suspects around so robbing this group would probably require outright banditry rather than thievery, and the group really wouldn't want to hurt the kind young initiate with them.

Also note that while well equipped, the two Hammer Bearers aren't really great fighters. Sif could handle both of them at once. With this in mind, their arrogance and swaggering is pretty funny; they look tough and act tough, but when it comes down to it, they aren't a giant mutant norsewoman. Sif spends much of the evening looming over them and being amused by their attempts to intimidate her and the others.

They settle down for the night, setting watches, and Katarine tries to convince the young Initiate his master is being a jerk, even suggesting maybe he wouldn't mind a life of adventure (it's...sort of worked out for her.) after he mentions he's trying to decide between becoming a parish priest or an adventuring Silver Hammer. She tells him he definitely seems to have the stuff to be a real Warrior Priest (he's obviously in good shape, carries his hammer like he knows how to swing it, etc) and tries to imply he might consider leaving Johannes to the care of the Hammer Bearers and coming with them instead. Nils won't abandon his duty, and gets a little insulted by the insinuation that his situation is anything like Katarine's was before she met the team. This is how this meeting goes; Nils won't hear anything against his cruel master, though if you have a PC slot free I imagine the conversation goes differently and thus he joins the party. Sadly, the team had to make room for the abused spouse and so Nils will continue on his unhappy trajectory for the canon path.

Once everyone has settled down, the treated elf, the rear end in a top hat priest, and everyone not on watch ends up in bed after an evening meal. And then the mutants creep out of the secret passage in the well that you basically cannot possibly find.

It's going to be a crazy night.

I like the setup. Jerk Sigmarites are always fun to deal with, Nils would be a good way to hand the party a hireling or a replacement PC (if he had his EXP recorded, or even whether or not he's spent any), and the hardened adventurers trying to resist the urge to rob the fat jerk and be done with it is fun. I suspect Nils is in there partly to keep the party from doing as Shanna suggested, since I doubt most groups will want to hurt the kind and devoted young Initiate. The many ways Johannes can run off to get the Warhammer Cops are all pretty annoying, though, and any of them completely derail the scenario. Which is odd; all of this is intensely railroaded, and punishes you for derailing it, but it's also surprisingly easy to derail. Next time, we get to the meat of how this adventure fucks itself up.

Next Time: The Quality of Mercy

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grassy gnoll
Aug 27, 2006

The pawsting business is tough work.
I assume the answer is "of course he didn't think about it," but are you given any guidance as to what to do if one of the PCs is a Sigmarite with more pull or a highly-connected Witch Hunter or whatever else might trump Johannes?

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