More quick newsletters, let’s get these over with. I’ve been in the habit of reviewing our old school D&D campaign every ten sessions, and it seems to be that time again.
Coup Fourscore Review
Every ten sessions of the campaign, I summarize what we’ve been doing, update the high score lists and make any general remarks that might be necessary for posterity. This is supposedly a higher-perspective campaign documenting process compared to the session-by-session notes I’ve been doing as well.
Here are the prior reviews in the series:
The original campaign pitch
The Decaton Review
The Icosiad Celebrations
The Tritonian Review
The Quadratic Review
The Anniversary Jubilee
The Hexadecaton Review
The Septuagint Deliberations
For me this decaton has been most remarkable for the amount of campaign development talks we’ve been having with the Selintan league (the Monday night online group). The Sunndi league has been strolling along in what to me appears a pleasant, steady manner, with plentiful creative rewards. Selintan has been more in turmoil, in a way that to me seems to point towards creative maturation.
To be more specific, we’ve been playing a high-quality game with a complex scenario, and the anti-dungeoneering patterns of strategic play have been frustrating some players while being a delight to others; it’s not entirely clear whether the group actually wants to play in the way we do. I’ve been really happy about these matters coming up for frank discussion, as which ever way we decide to develop the campaign, the fact that the players care to talk about it demonstrates both commitment and creative security. So even if there’s some turmoil and creative challenges here (some of it definitely against specific ideals that I champion), the fact that we can actually have these creative debates is clearly a good thing to my mind. (I mean, assuming we don’t just decide to stop playing altogether. I’m not seeing signs of that myself, though.)
Scenarios played
Practically speaking, what the Selintan league has been focusing on for the entire decaton has been the Illmire cult thing, that adventure took ten sessions to get through! We play fairly short sessions in the Monday night online game, typically a bit over 3 hours total, so it’s not quite as campaign-length as it sounds, but the adventure sure took its time. We started in session #70 when the poor dumb fools of the Fearmother cult decided to kidnap one of our hirelings; the trail of death only ended last week with session #81 (I’ll get to it with the actual play reports), with the cult far more dead and gone.
While the cult thing (I guess that’s my name for the adventure now) could be conceived of as this neat series of interconnected “adventures” involving assaults to various adventure locations and so on, the organic, deliberate, unforgiving wargaming way we’ve been playing made it resemble a siege more than anything else. Lots of time spent on micromanaging things that D&D campaigns often ignore, like operational security, various logistics, prisoner management, civilian society PR, and generally just we spent a fair amount of time planning, far more than we did executing. Thence the above-mentioned talks about whether we’ve gone off the deep end and forgotten what’s fun about D&D in the first place.
And of course my character, The Bard, got his spurs (2nd level) off these events! More on that in the Ap reports.
Meanwhile with the Sunndi league, I’ve been GMing myself. Some of the old regular players haven’t been partaking this spring (work-related scheduling reasons in the main), so we’ve been playing with a fairly small group for most of the decaton. There’s been a recent up-tick, though, with some old friends joining the campaign. Besides, we’ve gotten some good experimental stuff done when the group’s been smaller, so for me it works either way.
In Search of the Unknown is an old classic, deeply dumb TSR adventure from the earliest days of published D&D. The adventure is remarkable for its literary room descriptions and the laughable difficulty level, and while it’s kinda pointless for general lack of challenge and goals, we had fun for several sessions perfecting the group’s dungeoneering tactics. Also, a carrion crawler, so you know it has that sweet TPK potential.
Dhalmond Bounty Hunting is one of these experimental adventures that I like to try out: the adventurers, after giving up on the Caverns of Quasqueton (In Search of the Unknown, above), got convinced to start making money by hunting colorful outlaws for money all around the principality of Dhalmond. So far it’s been going great; a nice mixture of urban investigation, hexcrawl and location adventures. I imagine this stuff will bop up as quick filler adventures for a long time to come.
Magister’s Mining Maneuver is our first stab at a clearly mid-tier adventure, involving the demon-worshipping Magister of the Song traveling to the barbaric Hollow Hills to mine onyx for his fell necromantic purposes. Complicating the matter are Magister’s demon politics (Orcus is greenlighting the affair, Demogorgon is not) and the local barbarians, mainly.
Death Frost Doom came up at the very end of the decaton, as a sort of adventure-within-adventure embedment in the MMM hexcrawling activity: a Satanic bible of sorts is to be found and retrieved from an ancient cult shrine. The scenario is still on-going at this writing, and I assume we’ll get back to the mining thing afterwards.
The High Score Table
I list characters of 2nd level or higher. Characters entering from prior campaigns only enter the honor rolls after having showings (leveling), tracked unlisted as “ringers” until then. I’m keeping characters newly dead since the last update on the rolls, only removing them next time. Name Level’s the Dream, so all honor to the high achievers!
| Score | Character | League | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reigning | 20 384 XP (18 658) | Sven Torsson Mint Reaver (Barbarian 4) Dead by Turbo-Wizard | 🪦 |
| Runner‑Up | 14 213 XP (12 707) | Rob Banks Near-Mint Foil Elder Brother (Thief 5) Saved Illmire | Selintan |
| 2nd RU | 13 283 XP (ditto) | Phun Eral Mint Foil Magister of Wee Jas (Theurgist 4) | Selintan |
| Honors Roll | 10 252 XP (8 773) | Artemur Fairy Blade Weredeer (Fighter/Elf-Friend 3) Saved Illmire | Selintan |
| 2nd | 7 854 XP (5 882) | Kermit the Hermit Savage Forester Cleric 3 Found religion, saved Illmire | Selintan |
| 3rd | 7 685 XP (7 117) | Magister of the Song (Cultist 4) | Sunndi |
| 4th | 6 251 XP (4 654) | Ælfstan Foil Immaculate (Monk 4) Saved Illmire | Selintan |
| 5th | 5 928 XP (4 471) | Stone Battlecreek Half-Orc Barbarian 4 Saved Illmire | Selintan |
| 6th | 4 650 XP (3 650) | Bard the Eunuch Chorister Bard 3 Corrected in audit | Sunndi |
| 7th | 3 450 XP (2 349) | Saad Maan Mint Baklun Evil Fighter 2 Harmonized with Green Devil Shield | Selintan |
| 8th | 3 004 XP (2 566) | Aku The Akuma Wizard of the Book 2 | Sunndi |
| 9th | 2 813 XP (ditto) | Sparrow Royal Inquisitor (Paladin 2) | Sunndi |
| 10th | 2 739 XP (ditto) | Peter Pandemic Wild Goat Ranger (Ranger 2) | Selintan |
| 11th | 2 650 XP (-) | Scar Prince of the Hills (Barbarian 2) Looted DFD | Sunndi |
| 12th | 2 535 XP (ditto) | Lalli Praetor of Fear (Blackguard 3) | Sunndi |
| 13th | 2 510 XP (ditto) | Rocky Balboa Fightin’ Cultivator (Fighter 2) | Sunndi |
| 14th | 2 270 XP (1 570) | Trumhal Forkner Half-Orc Assassin Retainer 3 Saved Illmire | Selintan |
| 15th | 2 232 XP (-) | Timppa the Warrior Doublepurse (Fighter 2) | Sunndi |
| 16th | 2 218 XP (1 865) | Bob Wretch Foil Commoner 3 | Selintan |
| 17th | 2 064 XP (-) | The Bard Bard 2 Saved Illmire | Selintan |
| 18th | 1 577 XP (2 580) | Fridswid the Elflock (Elf-Friend / Witch 2) Corrected in audit | Selintan |
| 19th | 1 412 XP (-) | <unnamed> Thief 2 Captured Sam-Em-Ap | Sunndi |
| (ringer) | ~4 702 XP (ditto) | John Hawkwood Slave Chevalier (Paladin 3) | 🔔 |
| (ringer) | 31 030 XP (ditto) | Luigi de Luca foil Saint (Theurgist 6) Second Ultramontain | 🔔 |
| (ringer) | 1 435 XP (ditto) | Senja Foreign Battle Master (Fighter 3) | 🔔 |
I added some notes for where characters who’d particularly improved their scores made those new gains. And of course, there’s Sven — still the reigning champion for now! Next time around it seems likely that Rob Banks will finally step into his deserved place as the eminent grease of the Selintan League; Rob’s been participating in a lot of adventures, and with Sven gone it’s just him and Phun Eral still going from the campaign’s beginning. As Phun’s player is GMing for us right now, Rob has a golden chance here!
While I would dearly love to see them being more competitive, the Sunndian league’s success on the lists rests largely on Magister’s shoulders; I think he has the chance to punch near the top if his current adventure goes well. It’s not that the Sunndians don’t play, but rather that characters tend to die a fair bit, so XP doesn’t get to accumulate as much. Also, I think that the situation might be improving; check out Aku the Akuma, he’ll be a top contender himself if his current high-risk play (tackling Death Frost Doom, ha ha) pans out.
AP Report Pile: Coup de Main #79
We continued with the Illmire cult gig once more. As Tuomas has it:
Knights Temps had achieved some sort of victory last time against the fear cult and their Fearmother last time and continued their plans. This time they planned to scout the path leading south and start burying the Fearmother’s nest.
Bard organized their henchmen to start moving soil close to the cultist lair entrance. They intended to seal the place to keep Fearmother permanently in her little hole. Rob lead Knights’ stealthier types south to scout the path.
In the south Rob & co. encountered some cultist amidst giant mushroom that seemed to grow in the area filling strange liquids into devices that pushed out foul gas. They ambushed them and took prisoner. Interrogations proved fruitful, they learned that the cult had an lab outside a giant mushroom cave and they were cooking fear potions, using them to corrupt mushrooms to shriekers to produce more fear potions and shipping the fear potions to Illmire. They thought all this was rather strange behavior but at least the unemployed miners had something to do. Right?
At this point all finesse was dropped and Rob & co. assaulted the cultist lab with bloody results. The cultists didn’t manage to resist the experienced adventurers and they put an end to their fear lab and returned to help with shoveling dirt to the dungeon.
Meanwhile at the cultist lair the fear aura was still present, but Bard steeled himself once again and check downstairs to see if anything had changed. First disturbing observation was that the heavy door leading to the dungeon was ajar and black slime trail came out of it.
It was quickly concluded that this must have been a spawn of the Fearmother that had hatched last time when Rob snatched the lockbox from her lair. Kermit was sent to hunt down the creature.
Kermit easily picked the slime trail and followed the creature through the day west to Gnarley Forest proper. At sunset he found the trail leading into old foxhole. It didn’t take much provocation to get the hideous tentacled slug beast to show itself and Kermit skewered it without much problems. He set camp for the night after packing the slimy trophy to take back next day.
Except the creature recovered from being impaled by spear and tried to slink away into night. Kermit woke in the middle of the night to grunting noises and upon investigating found the satchel he had left the creature in was empty and fresh slime trail leading away.
Kermit ran after the creature and smited it with his relic mace laced with Power. Only ashes remained of the creature this time. It was an enemy of Pelor it seems.
Kermit managed to return to cultist lair next day without further problems.
Gotta say that the Fearmother’s “so Alien I can’t believe it’s not Giger” shtick has kept us well confounded. Much of the strategic uncertainty of this adventure rests on the question of what the Fearmother even is: is it sentient? Is it dangerous to the biosphere (as in, will it destroy the world if we leave it be)? Can we just bury it into its dungeon and leave it be?
I personally kinda suspect that the undying giant head in the dungeon, combined with the Fearmother, will come to haunt us later on. But for now we simply didn’t have a credible basis of action to risk our lives in direction action, so sealing the dungeon won the day. The GM will need to demonstrate the consequences before we’ll come back and dig the place out again.
Also, Kermit’s so cool. Did you notice how he actually beat out Magister, Sunndi’s most evil son, in the high score listings?
AP Report Pile: Coup in Sunndi #52
Meanwhile in Sunndi… last week we’d taken a break from Magister’s Mining Mania, our adventure on Hollow Hills, so now we were quite ready to get back into that. Two weeks back we’d established the basic conceits of the expedition (who’s adventuring, where the expedition starts, how we handle dicing and logistics and so on), so now we could just begin hexcrawling.
First, though, a new player character. We’ve been running with a fairly small core crew lately, so when we lost a character to Silent Hill last time, we also lost the team’s Ranger. So good work with your management philosophy of “I got mine”, Magister. I know mines are now your thing (somehow), but maybe look after your specialists, too…
The new character is a thrice-burned Witch, an example of what you can do with a Wretch (a character with a particularly bad stat line) in Coup. Surprisingly useful due to accidentally having a spell for creating charmed faerie bonfires. A bit of work to set one up as a camp fire (and impossible outside woodlands for lack of sufficient firewood), but so, so useful in hexcrawling.
The general thrust of the session was hexcrawling, so you know: subtle advancement of parallel concerns in mapping, resources, random encounters. Magister’s investment into Geosensing (when he decided to start riding the Orcus and Demogorgon bicycles in parallel, as one does) paid off big-time when he outright discovered the major subterranean agate layer that’s probably half of all the agate in the Hollow Hills put together. (Agate is not super-rare, that’s kinda one of the twists in this geological adventure here.) That plus some luck ended up with the party even finding a fairly easily mined little onyx deposit. I could see Scrooge McDuck here staying to mine that out when it’s found, but interestingly enough Magister decided to push on; he’s sort of committed to doing things the Evil way, so gotta find some natives to enslave as miners first, then worry further about digging up the black gold.
The session’s actually important content came in the tail-end. We hadn’t met anybody in the hills, which I choose to believe to be because the Meno Woods fringe the adventurers had been skirting is fairly abandoned. Actually, I think there was a bunch of hunters whom Aku the Akuma decided to hide from, so they don’t count. The real action started when some hill barbarians ambushed the party, completely surprising and surrounding them.
Being as the barbarians didn’t just decide to attack and kill (lucky reactions, though I strive for social realism so it wasn’t that likely in the first place), meeting them turned into quite the infodumb over the general state of the Hollow Hills and whatnot. As the adventurer-prospectors (as the Beast Society demon cultist crew here chose to present themselves) had broken local laws by not presenting themselves to the clan before prospecting on their lands, the clansmen ended up taking the charismatic and soft-spoken Magister with them, escorting the party to the clan fort. This was exactly what Magister was planning for, so good for him; he’d wanted to find locals ever since coming to the Hills.
We met a bunch of the barbarians, Magister convinced the clan to permit his excavations, and we learned a lot about the local adventure hooks (kobolds in the abandoned mines stealing sheep, yadda yadda) and clan politics (lots of other clans, some we marry some we kill), so it was quite the success in that regard. We even managed to check out one of the abandoned mines in the clan lands; didn’t seem too promising as an agate mine, which is understandable considering that they’d been mining iron there in the before-times.
With the party gaining a lot of intricate information about the local situation, the next step in the big plan is presumably for Magister to set himself up as some kind of authority, somehow. The hill clans do not know what sort of viper they’re holding here; it’ll be interesting to see whether they have anything that can contest a 4th level Cultist in intrigue warfare, or if they’re going to succumb to his demonic wiles.
State of the Productive Facilities
Yep yep, working hard or hardly working. As I’ve intimated before, I think that part of the reason for why I haven’t been getting much done over the last few months is that I’ve just generally been fairly happy and healthy, and that seems to kill all my writing motivation. Why write when I could be reading and exercising and being happy instead.
I’m working to get the productivity patterns into place again, though. The best part is that age-worn wisdom tells me that some damn thing is going to disrupt my life soon anyway, so I lose the strand on what I was doing. That always happens. Just going to be something arbitrary and random from my perspective, other people’s shit that I’m too socially responsible to ignore.