Following the first adventure, our heroes had managed to salvage an intact rowboat from the ship they explored (and sunk). So they brought their rented fishing boat back to the village, comfortable knowing that they could return it and use their new boat to get around.
It was never my intention for the game to be so boat-focused. You never can predict what players will latch onto.
This led to the campaign’s first downtime: The time spent in a settlement (in this case, a fishing village) between expeditions. This is time to heal, to sell the spoils from your last outing, to go shopping, to stock up on rations (yes, this is a thing, and no, it’s really not a hassle), and perhaps time to train up to a new level.
Downtime didn’t go great. It wasn’t unpleasant, but the gang didn’t buy much, and no one gained a level. It wasn’t exciting, which is a bit of a letdown for the end of the first adventure. This comes down to two things: The merchants I designed didn’t have enough interesting stuff to sell, and I was just too stingy with the treasure in the first adventure.
My recommendation for first adventures will be to make it simple, something that can be finished in one session, and make sure the group can find enough treasure for everyone to gain a level. (There are no experience points in this game, you just have to pay a trainer a certain amount to gain a level, and the cost rises as you gain levels.) For later adventures, this isn’t such a big deal, but I think that getting everyone to level up at the end of the first session is a good way to get everyone excited to play again.
A good thing to come out of downtime was that Agorak hired the group’s first follower. (I prefer this term over “henchman”, which is needlessly gendered, or “hireling”, which just seems a little cold.) I had them encounter a group of young adults who were visiting the village, playing Crackabout (a better version of dodgeball). Agorak hired a young orc named Jana to join their party. The rules for followers are simple: You pay an upfront cost to hire them. You have to pay for their rations. You have to provide their gear, and any gear they start with is probably figured into their cost. They start at level 0, and you have to pay to level them up, if you want. (The first level in a class is always extra expensive.) They don’t have ability scores; they’re just assumed to be average (between 8 and 11, no bonuses or penalties). The player who hires the follower controls that character, though the GM can step in to role-play as the follower if the player isn’t comfortable.
After that they followed their new lead: an old Imperial shipping manifest that led to a hidden fort on the river. They loaded up their boat and set off.
I didn’t write the dungeon for this adventure myself. I used an existing one and substantially rewrote the parts that needed to change to fit this game. I used “The Monastery of the Order of the Crimson Monks” from Dragonsfoot, an “old school D&D” community. You can download it for free if you’re interested: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=FE&fileid=309&watchfile=0
I still hadn’t fully developed my notions of what the monsters in this game should be like, so I just used the monsters listed in the dungeon, adapting them to these rules. By the time the gang finished the dungeon, I wouldn’t need to do this anymore.
This adventure exposed some of the frustrations of old-school dungeon crawls that I want to avoid. I didn’t give the players a map, suggesting that they should keep a rough map themselves. The problem is that this dungeon map had some very weirdly shaped rooms with precise dimensions. This kind of stuff is really hard to describe in “theater of the mind”-style play, and you end up with everyone having different notions of what each room looks like. This is extra difficult because we play on Hangouts (or Zoom or whatever we feel like in a given week). In person, I can just sketch out a rough map to show them what I’m describing, without having to show them the actual dungeon map. Over video chat, this is a pain.
My approach to future dungeon design will be to keep the spaces “real” and believable. Most rooms are square/rectangular, unless there’s a reason otherwise. A building shouldn’t be a maze unless it was designed to actually be a maze, which shouldn’t be common. How many sadistic architects are there? It’s possible for a space to be interesting to explore without it being a pain to describe.
I also came to realize that the trope of the “secret door”, a classic part of D&D and other RPG dungeons, just doesn’t really work for me. This game doesn’t have skill rolls, so if a player wants to look for a hidden door, I can’t just say, “Roll for it.” And that’s fine. I think the problem with those types of rolls is that you’re rolling to see if something interesting happens. You always want the players to succeed on those, because it’s more fun. This renders the secret door meaningless, unless you link it with a puzzle of some kind. Secret doors probably have a place in the game, but they shouldn’t be common, and I want to work on ways to make them fun and interesting, without just resorting to random rolls.
On the whole, the dungeon went well. Some interesting role-play and world-building came about when they encountered a small gang of Imperial infiltrators, who were intent on taking artifacts back to the Empire. The Imperials ultimately attacked the characters, and all but one of the attackers was killed. The remaining Imperial, named Kisreth, was kept with the group for a while, as they debated whether to free her without weapons, or bring her to town for a bounty. Eventually, she helped Forram fight off some ghouls using her powers as a pilgrim, and he lightened up his stance on her.
The last bit of the dungeon had the group find a tomb to an old Imperial knight. Their new companion Kisreth recognized the knight as a notorious war criminal and the tomb as a declaration of sainthood. As a religious Imperial, she was appalled by this. This gave Kisreth a reason to help them find the remaining Imperial infiltrators, as she realized that she shouldn’t have helped the Imperial Order that made this place, the Order of the Crimson Banner.
After that, they found the prefect — a high-ranking imperial leader — who ran this operation. He was a magician and a pilgrim, giving him a variety of magical abilities, and he was protected by guards and conjured skeletons. The ensuing battle was exciting, in part because it was the first time they fought an enemy that could match — and even counteract — their own magic. One of my favorite moments saw Agorak leave the room to grab a couple of maces from defeated enemies, then return to distribute them to allies fighting the skeletons. Maces are better for smashing bones than swords are. (The advantage of this under my rules is that it eliminates the bonus the skeletons get to their armor class against cutting or stabbing weapons.)
This adventure played out over several expeditions, dipping into the dungeon for a while then retreating back to town. The group spent their downtime in a larger town upriver, where they could find more shops and sell more things than they could in the fishing village. This went much better. The players seemed to enjoy the shops, and engaged in more role-play with the merchants and townsfolk. One that went over notably well was a shop called “i like cloth” (no caps), where an ettin (large troll) tailor with a handlebar moustache sold and repaired vintage clothing. Lendel brought him the hide of a giant crocodile that they fought to make a couple pieces of armor. I gave them a discount on the purchase for doing this.
Lendel’s player likes to collect useful monster bits to hopefully turn into gear, and he’s continued to do this since. This is an idea that I’m considering codifying a bit. It might be enough to give some indication in monster descriptions of what kinds of things could be made from them, and having similar descriptions on gear, describing what kinds of supplies could be used to make it. Bringing the right supplies to a merchant or craftsperson could get you a discount on the product (probably half price, by default). What I want to avoid is fixating on this practice so much that it becomes an expected part of play. I never intended it to be a core game mechanic, and some players might — understandably — think it’s gross and not enjoy it. If I include this idea in the rules, it will be important to frame it in the context of hunting and wilderness survival, as well as making it clear that you can opt out of using those rules at all, if it’s not right for your table.
By the end of the adventure, everyone had trained up a couple of levels, and Agorak even paid to get Jana trained as a warrior.
This adventure was much bigger than the first, and certainly more successful. I started to figure out the right balance between combat, trap/hazard, and puzzle/interaction encounters. Throughout the adventure, I tweaked the character classes’ abilities to give them better and more interesting options, as well as just tightening up the rules.
Up next, I wrote up an adventure entirely from scratch. It’s huge, and it’s still ongoing. The next post will get you all the way caught up to the time of writing.