Playtest Campaign Part 4: The Merchant District of Harzgard

Let’s discuss the group’s adventures exploring the western district of the abandoned town of Harzgard. As I explained last time, this town is essentially a big “dungeon”, with a handful of of smaller dungeons to explore within it, as well as a number of other interesting areas for the characters to explore.

This adventure took place over the course of several play sessions and several in-story expeditions. As you can see on the map below, the town was designed for open-ended exploration. Because of that, the various areas of the town aren’t designed to tell a linear story, but rather they provide a series of distinct encounters and vignettes, all linked by the background story of a disaster that drove the residents out and destroyed parts of the town.

I’m not going to try to recount everything; just the important bits and the parts that went particularly well or poorly.

This is the map of the district with the reference numbers from my notes

When the characters took their first expedition into Harzgard, they traveled on foot into town. One thing I’ve tried to do is make sure that all treasure in the game is not just piles of gold and jewels. A lot of the treasure they find contains valuable objects and resources: art, clothing, supplies. Of course, it’d be hard to justify the characters carrying a lot of these things out by hand (not that I’m using any strict rules for such things). So when the characters found a wagon in Harzgard, everyone instantly latched on to it.

This made me realize that wagons (or boats, if past sessions are any indications) ought to be a major part of the game. That’s not to say they need a lot of special rules. But it is worthwhile to make it clear in the rules that it is normal for travelers to have a wagon to carry supplies (even if it’s just a small one, pushed or pulled by the characters and their followers). If I were to create any sort of specific rules for different wagons, I might give each wagon a storage capacity, listed as a number of gold coins. That would be the highest total value of gold or commodities that you can store in the wagon at the start of an expedition. You wouldn’t bother to track this limit during an expedition; it’s just a limit on the amount of gold you can hang onto after the downtime between expeditions. This pushes characters to spend their gold rather than hoarding it.

The beginning of their adventures involved exploring the abandoned buildings near the front (2 on the map). By design, there was little to find in these buildings. No monsters, few valuables, just a few hints about what happened here: letters indicating that there was an evacuation because there were attacks closer and closer to the town. The conceit here is that the houses toward the front would have evacuated sooner, and thus be more thoroughly cleaned out. Of course, from a game design perspective, it also makes sense to put greater treasure deeper into the town, forcing them to venture further into danger to get it.

Their first bit of dungeoneering came about when they pushed north to 6. In this area, there was a tall tower that had partially fallen over, masonry covering the street and the top of the tower crushing a couple houses. They explored the basement of the tower and got into some weird magical hijinks in a small dungeon down below. That went fine. Afterward, they returned to the surface and searched the rubble. They found some valuables, including a satchel that carried five bottles of different magical beers. The beers are effectively just potions, but I enjoy the concept of magical beer.

In the rubble, they were also ambushed by a new monster (five of them, in fact): five boulders opened up and were revealed to be four-legged stone monsters that could roll up and bowl over enemies. This fight was sort of dull, actually. It dragged on for too long, and stoneguards are most dangerous when charging into battle. I had the stoneguards ambush them from up close, which eliminated the main threat. It turned the combat into just “roll dice until the bad guys are gone”. Not great.

Stoneguard: A headless troll-monster that can roll up into a boulder.

Later on, the gang got into a much more interesting encounter with stoneguards up in 15. This is a small neighborhood where the houses are all tall and have no space between them (think tenement houses). The streets are very narrow, and the houses are all boarded up. The gang encountered boulders in the street in a couple spots, almost as wide as the street. The boulders were of course stoneguards in disguise. When they rolled at the characters, there was nowhere for them to go. They had to come up with quick solutions, rushing to a nearby alley in one case, and later breaking down a door into a house. They actually avoided fighting entirely, by climbing to the rooftops and traveling that way.

Avoiding fights should be a valid option, so I’m glad they took it.

Over at 7, they walked a street of abandoned blacksmith workshops. One of them had a magical forge (permanently lit) and a magical anvil (can be used to enchant weapons, but only enough charge left to do it once). This was a fun little scene, with little danger, where they worked out how to operate the magic anvil. I like bits of low stakes interaction like this, between all the fighting or trap-dodging. The reward was significant (giving a weapon +2 to all attack rolls, permanently), so they didn’t feel like they wasted time.

After that scene, the characters spent the night in a shop (closing the door using a high-quality nail they bought in the City of Sole Harbor; I was very happy to see this purchase become meaningful). In the morning, loud stomping shook the ground, and they went outside to catch their first glimpse of the Beast Ogre that caused a lot of the damage in this district of Harzgard, leveling many buildings. The ogre had gorilla-like posture, curly ram’s horns, tusks, and it was 15-feet tall to the shoulder (more like 20 feet tall if it stood upright). Ogres in this world are huge, hungry monsters (not just big, mean humans). This started the group planning to hunt the ogre.

Eventually, they went to the huge manor house at 18. They had a brief encounter with a shapeshifting fairy called a pooka in the garden. It was funny, mostly. The pooka has a horse’s head, a human torso and two horse legs. Pooka run very fast and tackle people. It used this to separate Tony from his allies in the hedge maze. Then it just ran off, cackling.

In the manor house was perhaps the best fight of the campaign so far. The house was huge, and all the curtains were drawn. As they explored, Tony (poor Tony) was attack by a lilin, a shade that is invisible in the shadows and which magically extinguishes torches and lanterns. When a lilin grabs someone, it teleports them with it to somewhere else in the darkness nearby. This lead to a bit of panicking as the gang tried to find Tony and the lilin. Eventually, they started opening the curtains to reveal the lilin in the light and chasing it room to room. Nice reversal, very fun.

Lilin: A shade that kidnaps people in the darkness. Inspired by Jewish folklore.

In the ballroom, they encountered a sleeping ettin (a very large troll-folk; the player character Forram is also an ettin). This ettin was named Eldora, and she had been there hibernating for decades. Eldora is a wood troll, with a layer of bark on her skin. She is even taller than other ettins, but she had suffered terrible injuries to her legs, leaving her unable to walk.

The gang rescued Eldora, and she rewarded them by teaching Forram to be a Wood Troll. Eldora is a special trainer, and any troll character could learn to be a Wood Troll from her, for a significant expense. She has become a close ally to the group, who they visit in the woods for advice.

That’s not quite the end of their adventure in the Merchant District, but this has gone long. Next post will be all about ghosts, with a couple of stat blocks and some of the specific notions about ghosts present in this game. After that, we’ll talk about the hunt for the ogre, and the end of their adventure in the Merchant District (moving on to the eastern Military District).

Playtest Campaign Part 3: I heard you like dungeons...

With our heroes all finished with Fort Valtengard (the dungeon from Part 2), they set off downriver in their rowboat, to sell their treasures in the big city: Sole Harbor. (Alternately spelled Sol Harbor or Soul Harbor, and also it’s unclear if it’s “sole” as in “only”, or “sole” as in “a kind of fish”.)

They got to the city and saw our campaign’s first big settlement — a large coastal town still rebuilding from the war. I broke the city down into a few districts: The Waterfront, The Market, The Elder District and the War District.

The Waterfront serves as their new, probably temporary home base. They keep their boat there, and they found an inn to stay at— a kitschy, adventurer-themed establishment called “You All Meet in Here”. It serves as headquarters for now, and it’s a place to get rations and potions. (Right now, they only sell an extra strong, extra expensive healing potion. I think in the future I’ll just have them sell a wider array of basic potions in the form of mason jar cocktails.) The Waterfront also has an anarchist dwarf printmaker named Tiago. He’s a magician trainer and an opportunity for me to play the role of an aging punk.

The Market is exactly what it sounds like, with a bigger variety than in the smaller towns. There’s a blacksmith that specializes in fancy nails, a hunter and trapper duo offering training, and a nerdy, bespectacled teenage witch named Moonsong.

The Elder district is the oldest part of town. It’s a prettier area than the Market. It has a shoe shop, a cafe, and a yeshiva where characters can get magician training and pilgrim training. The standout NPC in the Market is Roberto, an orc and retired gentleman thief. He’s got tusks and a thin pencil moustache, hair always parted and perfectly slicked down. He lives off his stolen fortune, just chilling, drinking wine, and telling anyone who will listen stories about his heists (some of which are true). He’s a vagabond trainer, and he can also train someone as a thief. No one has taken him up on that yet.

The War District is totally ruined from the war. There is little effort to rebuild it. If it comes up, this is definitely where shady criminal types will have meetings and face-offs.

The characters met an old Imperial ship’s-captain named Eva. She’s surly, she’s missing an eye, and she sells old Imperial goods back to Imperial merchants, out on the sea in neutral waters. She is tolerated by the locals in spite of her Imperial loyalties, mostly because she can’t actually return to the Empire (for reasons she doesn’t discuss). She is the only person the gang has met who will buy certain Imperial objects at full value (mostly Imperial art).

Eva bought the spoils of their trip to Valtengard, and offered them a new opportunity to pursue: The Town of Harzgard.

Let’s talk about what my idea was here.

I wanted to write a whole dungeon myself, but I wanted it to be believable. Not realistic, mind you, just believable in the game world. They can’t all be big underground mazes. So I maybe got a bit over-ambitious. This “dungeon” is a whole abandoned town, surrounded by high walls. The town is split into three districts, and each district is to be explored much like a dungeon, with different neighborhoods serving as the encounter areas in the way that individual rooms do in traditional dungeons. Then, scattered around each district, there are a few buildings that will be explored as traditional dungeons.

It’s dungeons all the way down.

There was no way I could actually design the whole thing ahead of time. So I focused on the district they would explore first: the merchant district. I made a map, defined each of the areas, and wrote up the monsters they would encounter. No more hacking old D&D monsters into the game. Everything is new.

Here’s the rough map of the merchant district that the characters would eventually find:

The gray areas are the other districts that I haven’t yet designed.

That’s a lot of buildings! Obviously, I didn’t go in and map out every building. I decided that since the town was abandoned, most of the buildings would be empty, fully evacuated. Each neighborhood instead has a few “places of interest” laid out in my notes.

This went long, so my next post will discuss the gang’s adventures in the merchant district of Harzgard, right up to the time they hunted and fought a huge bestial ogre in the Harzgard market square.

Playtest Campaign Part 2: Now for a Real Dungeon

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.

Playtest Campaign Part 1: The First Adventure

Once the gang had made their characters, I set them up for their first adventure. I still hadn’t codified the structure of the game, so I kept the first one small.

We established that Lendel, Forram, Agorak and Tony had recently started traveling together. Tony is a vagabond, and one advantage of the vagabond class is that they start with a treasure map. The group was going to seek out that treasure together.

The group started off by arriving in a small village. They started with very little money, so shopping was unlikely to be a priority. I created a few merchants for them to interact with. The one they gravitated toward was the old fisherman, a dwarf named Carlo (he hates fish). They made a deal with Carlo to rent his boat, so that they could take it down the river to their destination faster.

I decided that a fair reward for this was to halve the travel time to their destination. From then on, this has become the standard benefit for doing anything that should speed up travel. The journey would have been 7 days on land, so it would be about 3 days in the boat. This sort of thing is going to be a major focus of my text on gamemastering — guidance on adjudicating benefits for the players’ good ideas. The game’s systems are meant to be very straightforward, so the benefits need to be very clear and simple.

I also used a simple, temporary rule for random encounters while traveling: I rolled 1D6 for each day and each night, and on a 1, there is an encounter. I adjusted this rule several sessions later, when it proved to lead to too many random encounters. Effectively, I halved the odds. Later, I realized that the real problem was that I treated every such encounter as an attack. I started having environmental hazards (like bad weather that forces a saving roll), and more recently mixed in some non-dangerous encounters, like meeting other travelers. I’m not satisfied with the “daily die roll” for encounters, so I’ll be working on that eventually.

The group went to a cave on the river where the map led them. They found an old wrecked Imperial ship there, which served as the “dungeon” for this adventure.

The ship dungeon was almost entirely improvised. I hadn’t written up stats for any monsters yet, and I hadn’t quite worked out how I wanted this sort of thing to work. I made a rough map of the decks of the ship, and I had an old AD&D 1st edition monster manual on hand. I converted the monsters on the fly, and made some things up as needed. I didn’t get more organized until after this adventure.

It was a short couple of encounters on the ship. They explored a little, found some valuables in the captain’s cabin, went below deck and suffered their first trap/hazard: loose floorboards on the stairs. Tony failed his Avoid save, fell through the stairs, and found himself surrounded by bugs that released acid when squished, burning through the floor. The others pulled Tony out and decided to find a different way down. I did not expect this.

I planned for them to explore some rooms, fight some creepy crawly things, trip some traps/hazards, and make their way to the bottom of the ship. They decided to go back to their rowboat and take it around the ship looking for holes to enter the ship through. I decided that this was logical and told them that they found one. This led to the final “battle” of the adventure: Inside the ship’s hold, they found a murky pool of water, and suddenly, skeletal arms swam toward them.

I think the idea of swimming skeletons is neat. I’m not sure why.

The group started to fight the skeletons, but they were hard to find in the dark. Only Tony could see clearly, because he’s a dwarf and they have Ghostsight (the ability to see in the dark, and see/speak to ghosts). He saw that there was a ghost in the hold commanding the skeletons. Tony talked the ghost down, discovering that all it wanted was for the ship to sink completely. They convinced the ghost to let them take the valuables from the boat in exchange for sinking it. They busted a few choice holes in the hull and let the ship sink, helping the ghost pass on.

One of the crates they took had a shipping manifest with directions to a secret Imperial fort, giving them somewhere to go for the next adventure. In retrospect, this seemed a little bit on-the-nose, but it worked fine.

The adventure ended with the gang finally following the treasure map to a buried chest, which had a nice set of bracers made by one of Tony’s ancestors (a good piece of armor for Tony), as well as some gold.

I don’t think I handled the treasure map particularly well. It felt very tacked on. But it helped me work out exactly what I wanted from the idea of treasure maps in this game.

Treasure maps give the group a clear idea of where they can find a valuable treasure. The one thing I realized early on is that you need to make sure that a treasure map is clearly valuable. The group will always have adventures to go on (or else the game would be boring). So the treasure map needs to give them more than just somewhere to go — it needs to give them the promise of a specific reward above and beyond what they would normally expect. In this first adventure, I left the contents of the treasure map vague. After that, I decided to make sure that any treasure maps they acquired would tell them about a specific, unique treasure, like a magical object.

That first adventure was pretty flawed, but everyone had a good enough time to want to do it again.