So this happened

This Friday Night session report is brought to you by Butterbridge Vinters, makers of such fine wines as Ol' Purple, Only a Penny, and Retch.   Looking to forget your troubles?  Need a mild laxative?  Try a Butterbridge Wine!

After a pleasant week spent in Foxhollow, the party decided that they should move on.  Tim (cleric) was eager to make his mark on the world and prove himself to his new companions, especially the acerbic Henril.  Packing up their horses and carts, they left town heading towards Milham to the west.  The first day was peaceful and pleasant although they did meet an unusual number of travelers on the road heading west.  Conversations with the travelers revealed that they were leaving Milham because they were afraid of the sickness that had been spreading around the town.  Now the players knew of this sickness, it had been spreading since the first adventure and the times that the players had convalesced in the Milham Abbey in order to recover lost STR points they had seen the sick from outlying manses being tended to.  Apparently things were getting worse.  They camped that night beside a bridge along with a number of families what were fleeing Milham.  Chatting with the people they heard various theories about the cause of the plague, that it was spread by the bandits, that it was punishment for prideful behavior, that it was linked to the old shrine deep in the swamp, or even it was caused by a group of adventurers who had recently come to Milham and stirred up evils from the dwarven ruins (who could that be?).

Encounter with the sticky bears as depicted by Henril

The following day they ran into a small gang of bandits who were enjoying the extra business opportunities along the road.  They picked the wrong caravan to attack and this was made clear to them when Thedric charmed one and another was dispatched in a single blow.  The rest of the bandits fled and the party curiously decided not to pursue them.  Up tho this point I don't think I've seen them show any restraint on chasing down and killing foes on the run.  I suppose they didn't see any percentage in a few bandits.  Anyway they took the two heads in order to identify the fellows later on in Milham.  A few hours later as they approached the further outskirts of Milham, they came across another clump of emigrants leaving town.  As they exchanged greetings, a small dog came running up barking.  The dog had purple goo on it's fur.  As they investigated, they also heard some cries for help far off in the forest.  So leaving Thedric with their carts, they raced off to investigate.  What they found was a young man trying to rescue his wife from some purplish coloured bears.  She seemed to be unable to move and so they rushed in to drag her out of harms way and to smite the creatures.  They soon discovered that the purple goo was toxic and caused paralysis. What they didn't discover until much later was that it was also very flammable.

So a long running battle ensued where the party would bash the monsters and then someone would become paralyzed and the 'bear' would grab them and start walking into the forest.  They were not smart foes, but they were tough and persistent.  When they finally dispatched one of the beasts it came apart more like a plant than an animal, falling to the ground with a large cracking sound and throwing out roots.  It would have been a tougher battle except I had forgot to roll d4 for the effects of the poison and gave the players a 'save' against the paralysis each turn.  My gaff was balanced out as the party weren't using fire on the monsters.  Even so, the party was badly wounded by the time they dispatched 6 of the creatures and they had traveled quite far into the forest towards the 'mother'.  The mother was a huge smelly tree with long tentacles which would grab nearby animals and toss them into it's gaping maw.  It also had a number of suspicious purple 'fruit' hanging from it's branches.  One look at that and they finally ran back to the wagon to get some oil and torches.  They quickly decided that they would send Ann (the halfling) in with the oil to throw at the tree and they would follow (at a safe distance) with torches to light it.  With a few choice curses, she agreed and they carried out the plan.  She snuck into the clearing and got as close as she dared and then threw the oil.  The tree dropped some 'fruit' with a splat and out of the fruit came more of the 'gummy bears', these ones smaller than the previous.  The rest of the party came up and threw torches at the tree and began fighting the little wortlings (for this is pretty much what they were - my take on an orcwort and wortlings).  The tree burned and billows of acrid smoke flew into the air.  They fought on the edge of the clearing trying to prevent the wortlings from dragging anyone into reach of those terrible tentacles.  Colin KO'd himself rolling nice and high on the critical fumble table, something that remains a neverending source of enjoyment to everyone.  Finally a flaming tentacle struck the last wortling and it burst into flame as the tree gave a mighty shudder and died.

That evening they finally arrived in Milham.  Thedric seems to have become the party accountant and the next day he liquidated and divided out much of the remaining loot, including four of the horses and two of the carts.  Luckily for them goods were scarce and prices were high in Milham due to the ongoing banditry and the 'plague', otherwise they might have thought to have someone with a higher charisma deal with the merchants. It also helped that he started a rumour that eating from silver utensils was a remedy for plague.  Henril was eager to find out if he had any marriage prospects to review, and indeed upon meeting with the wine crier, he found he had three.  Convincing Ann to be his 'agent' he arranged to visit all his prospects.  The first was too hot (a bigoted shrew of a mother looking to cash in on her rather robust daughter and who took a shine to Father Tim), the second was too cold (a family of rail thin and nervous folk looking for a well to do business man for their bookish daughter), and the last seemed just right (a hard working bar maid looking for a decent man).  He resolved to meet her at the Seven Stones tavern later on that evening.

And that's where we wrapped up for the night.  I had hoped to get through more in this last session but in a sandbox you take what you can get and if the players are happy and laughing then it's all good.  However, due to some scheduling issues, there will be one more play test session after all.  This pleases me.  The party was deciding if they should go south into the hills again or check out the shrine in the swamp.  Possibly they will come up with an entirely different notion - but I'm sure that will be fun too.

Objects in mirror

48!?  Who's been touching my lucky dice?

Well it's been almost a year since I started this design blog for Beacon and I just noticed I just posted my 100th post on September 1st.  Last September I was busily working away on my own little fantasy heartbreaker and I had just gone from reading blogs about role playing and playing Microlite with the kids to starting this blog and signing up with a local game group, getting ready to play some real grownup RPG.  Since then I've been introduced to Savage Worlds, Atomic Highway, and Hero system.  I've also had the chance to run a good play test of my Beacon d20 rules.  Ya 100 posts in a year isn't a lot really but then again I tried to keep this about Beacon and not so much about all the other things I like.  Maybe if I could come up with a good name I'd start an alternate blog and post about books and video games and other things.  Maybe that would be too much work.

Next Friday will be the first anniversary of the Beacon site and serendipitously it will also be the last in this series of Beacon play tests.  Now we're going to play some other games and even though I have really enjoyed the DMs chair again, I'm excited to get back into the player seat for a bit.  We will have played 7 sessions and all the characters will have made level 3 or be near enough that it makes no matter.  I am hopeful that we will return to Beacon again later on to continue the fun testing, either with the existing characters or new ones starting out at level 3 - or some mix of the two.  I also hope to release the 5th draft of Beacon this fall and incorporate the lessons learned from this play test.  A lot of the work I have been putting in this summer has been in the setting of this play test and even though much of it is sandbox, I've grown fond of it.  I believe I am going to try to put together something in the vein of a sandbox guide to the world appropriate for use with Beacon and hopefully easily adaptable for any low level d&d based campaign.  I don't expect it will be a hefty grimoire in the vein of THE WORLD OF BEACON! but it might be a nice PDF.  I really enjoy the sandbox full of plot nuggets campaign approach (for some reason I'm thinking of a catbox now...ugg) but I'm not partial to the pure hexcrawl.  I find that unless I have a general knowledge of the area the players are running about in, it's hard for me to run a decent game.  Maybe putting together some short world overviews and a couple maps will appeal to those of a similar bent.

The side trip

Ya it's been slow on here but it's summer and I was on vacation and stuff.  Anyway.  Last session we had a couple folks not playing and really with two players out for the night I didn't want to just continue the adventure without them.  I decided however, that instead of playing a board game or something, maybe I could just run a different set of characters in the same sandbox.  This was great, I advise doing this when you can.  Since one of the characters (the rogue) was still in town in Milham (having been away the previous session), I got the other two players roll up a couple new first level characters.  It doesn't take much to get players to roll up new characters, and in Beacon it only takes like 5-10 minutes to do it.  So we had a new party of three; a very strong and very stupid fighter (MIND 4!), a fledgling mage, and the halfling rogue (the one who had been rescued from goblins) all equipped up and resolving to head south into the hills to look for more of that sweet dwarven treasure.

Well the south gate was closed.  In fact the town was crawling with soldiers from Red Towers and they were not letting people travel south because they were fighting sorties against goblins!  Fortunately the fighter was a local and he knew a fellow who had a basement with a passage through the city walls.  So later that evening our heroes found themselves following a old fishing trail along the river after greasing a palm.  They subsequently snuck* their way southwards down the road.  They traveled south for a day avoiding the soldier patrols and were attacked by large spiders in the forest when they made their camp. The fighter was bitten, lost some STR and had to make a couple poison saves before the venom burned out of his system. Eventually they made it to the hills.  Towards the end of the second day they noticed a plume of dust on the horizon and so climbed a small rise to see in the distance a group of soldiers on horseback riding down a goblin raiding party.  The running fight approached towards their location, passing below them along the road, and they hunkered down to avoid detection.  That's when they noticed one goblin running off away from the pack and unseen by the soldiers. They decided this was their chance and quickly sneaked** off to follow him.

there's a cave under that tree!

I must say I really liked the characters; the eager for a scrap rogue, the dopey fighter and the fresh faced mage writing down all his adventures in his travel journal.  It's a shame what happened to them really - but I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself here.

The intrepid adventurers followed the goblin away from the road and into some brush along a the top of a steep ridge and finally to an old gnarled tree. When they checked the tree out they found a small cave opening and carved stairs leading down into the darkness.  Being brave and adventurous,they fired up some torches and down they went.  The stairs were old and went down quite a way before opening out into a stone hall with big pillars and a floor covered with years of accumulated rubbish.  There were goblins who had heard them coming and who were hiding behind the pillars.  The goblins let fly a hail of bolts from their crossbows and the party moved to attack.  They did pretty good combat wise.  Whenever the fighter landed a blow he would demolish a goblin, he was very strong and using a large two handed hammer (essentially a maul).  While he was bashing goblin heads and the mage was firing off magic missiles, the rogue took advantage of the darkness to creep up behind and back-stab another goblin, and soon the fight was over.  They searched the refuse and found nothing of value.  They determined that this was an old dwarven hall, now with one wall all bricked up with a rather large crude carving on it. The carving had a large hole where the mouth should have been which seemed to have some natural light coming through it.  They crawled through the hole and saw that this was the other half of the great hall and that along one wall it had a large archway open to the sky.  Looking out the archway they saw that it looked out on a deep crevasse in the hillside and across it on the other side was another archway and what looked like the remains of a rope bridge, still swinging.  They had rope and so they managed to hook the rope bridge, pull it across and fasten it back up, but as they crossed they were met by another hail of crossbow bolts and again they charged into battle quickly defeating the 4 goblins on the other side.  In this other hall, they noticed a hole in the roof and carved stairs going downwards.  The rogue decided to climb up the hole but goblin above began hurling sticks and logs from their fire down the hole.  Giving up on that approach, they decided to go down the stairs and at the bottom they surprised another handful of goblins.  They dived in and killed two, however the fighter and then the mage both were taken down by a few lucky short sword attacks.

Now the problem with a party of three is that if one is incapacitated you loose a big chunk of your potency,  with two down... well it was looking very grim there for a very conflicted rogue.  "Save yourself!" yelled her companions as they were overwhelmed.  And so she did - fleeing back up the stairs and across the bridge, cutting it down behind her.  She ran all the way back to the road and for half the night before running into one of the Baron's patrols.  They escorted her back to Milham and so we ended the evening.

I think that it was quite fun, and having another parallel story going in 'the sandbox' really seemed to flesh it out more and make it seem more alive.  I know that the gang up in the forest will be interested to learn about this goblin infested ruin and certainly the rogue has a great story to tell them and perhaps some motivation to return there.  I might have to do some slight of hand to bring them back together, which is one of the problems with having an adventure end out in the field (I have to try to prevent this in future), but I think I can figure out something   In my opinion, it was one of the more fun sessions and with the small party - the level of excitement was pretty high even though no treasure was found and there were relatively few encounters.  Also I enjoyed the roleplaying and the characters never seemed like substitutes -  they had personalities and it was terrible when they were taken down by the goblins.  Poor dumb bastards, they just weren't careful enough.  How fantastic!


* apparently sneaked is the proper past form of sneak and snuck is a johnny-come-lately and not recognized in many spell checkers -  but really, sneaked sounds stupid.
** see.