New on Desk #122 — Muster Nutshell

I felt like what I did for last newsletter — working on Muster and then writing the newsletter feature to be about that — worked well. Let’s try that again, I’ll put off writing this newsletter until I’ve worked on Muster some more. <later…> Well, it did take a few days, but at least I have results!

Manifesto, it’s a manifesto

So I wrote this condensed “flyer format” piece for Muster that’s going to be dual-use: it’ll work as a preface for the book, and it’ll also work as something laid out for a single-fold one sheet flier format. The latter is important because I envision using this same text as something the GM (I, or somebody intending to play something similar) can print out and distribute to the players in the first session of the campaign. Short and non-technical enough to really expect that the players (of whom not everybody is a book person) will read it, and thus achieve some common ground on what it is that we’re even trying to do in the game. Also, the text would ideally be inspiring, intriguing, to the kind of person who would enjoy the game if only we could convince them to attend.

Another use for this kind of flyer format is, of course, hiring players for an on-going game. If you’re the sort to hire, then I feel like being able to push a flier (perhaps two sheets: one on your specific campaign, the other this playstyle summary) at a prospect, with your contact information on it, might not be the worst thing to use.

If you’d like to look the piece over and tell me what to improve on it, I’d appreciate that. It’s short, but that’s the exact sort of thing where it’s far from obvious what should be said, and what left unsaid. As is usually the case, choosing your words carefully is harder than just pushing out a 150 pages of wandering blather.

AP report pile: Coup in Sunndi #56

Ah, the Easter Special of the Sunndi campaign. In the real world us filthy pagans played on Easter Sunday, I’m just getting around to discussing it now. Antti, a long-time regular who hasn’t had the time for the game this winter, had the opportunity for a joyous reunion with us, whence the unusual Sunday date.

This being the Easter special, I added a bit of a twist into the scenario. As discussed before, in the last session we’d maneuvered our second expedition into Death Frost Doom to a ready position to descend once more into the shrine. As our Easter session had three irregular players popping up, they got to form an entire secondary adventuring party that just happened to stumble in with a special quest: they were hunting a humanoid rabbit-like creature, a were-jackalope of sorts, that had apparently escaped from the hunt into the underground shrine here. The trail certainly seemed to enter the shrine.

(The Monday game’s Easter Special happened the next day on Easter Monday, chronologically. I’ve just been behind on these reports, which is why I wrote about that back in newsletter #119. After this week the two campaign forks are caught up on each other chronologically I guess. The fundamental gimmick was the same, with easter eggs being scattered in clusters around the dungeon at hand.)

I gave the new party a choice over who would lead the hunt — as in, who had the personal quest over cornering this mythical quarry. As none of the players wanted the task, we defaulted to a colorful NPC huntsmaster, a mysterious figure who had his own implied-insane interests in catching the easter rabbit. This NPC team leader, “Captain Ahab” mainly stayed out of the way in the early parts of the adventure, but as we would come to see, he had some part to play in the events to come. This choice of who would lead the hunting party was very decisive over the meaning of the events in play, even if it didn’t in my judgment affect the outcome of the adventure much.

So Aku the Akuma’s original party, in search of the Koraktor, had camped at the cursed mountain cabin, underneath which the shrine proper lay. They noticed the sounds of the Easter Bunny when it forced its way inside in the early morning hours, making its way into the underground shrine. While the party noticed that something was awry, they would only come to appreciate the full situation when a couple hours later the hunters arrived after their quarry.

This being a party consolidation situation, the players naturally quickly decided to join forces between the two groups of PCs. Both were clearly very suspicious, but circumstances (and ineffable unity of playerdom) made for unlikely allies. One the one side wizard Aku and his inscrutable reasons to be in this cursed place, and on the other the efflusive Ahab, who talked much but said little, and would easily lapse into passivity, leaving the actual players to decide how the party would proceed through various tactical foibles.

The main reason why Aku’s party, first on the scene, hadn’t managed to enter the shrine before the huntsmen arrived on the scene was that the adventurers had discovered a potentially quite interesting find in the graveyard close to the cabin: an underground vent closed by an iron grille, from whence a low susurrus the adventurers had been hearing ever since arriving seemed to originate. It took some time and elbow grease, but the adventurers managed to remove the grille and ascertain that this wasn’t an easy secondary entrance to the dungeon; the vent was large enough for a man to pass through, but it was also full of some kind of mysterious tangle of a substance that prevented passage further in. When the bunny-hunters joined the expedition, the vent was set aside for the time being.

With the enlargened mega-party (having what, eight or nine players at the table has been a bit unusual for the campaign) entering the shrine confidently, we made some fair progress. The earlier expedition had already charted the outer shrine, so this time it was mainly a matter of introducing the newcomers to the scary decor of this dead, still place. The Easter Bunny had been busy, running around hiding eggs everywhere. (I was randomizing these in real-time; to my horror the bunny decided to hide a Faberge Egg, the kinda-sorta big prize of the egg hunt, in the antechamber of the shrine. Fortunately it never occurred to the players to research a room the last expedition had already been to.)

One of the bunny-hunters was appropriately enough a bit of a tracker, so the players settled in comfortably to follow the tracks; I think they never figured out that the Bunny’s tracks were literally just “it’s entered each and every room of the entire dungeon at least once”, so finding the Bunny’s tracks here and there in the otherwise undisturbed dungeon made it seem like they were following something meaningful.

An interesting side effect of the bunny hunt was that although the players had pretty much come to the correct conclusion about how to open the sealed door to the inner shrine, them finding signs of the Easter Bunny having forcibly removed one of its own incisors to enter deeper into the dungeon pretty much clinched the deal for them: they’d need to have somebody sacrifice a tooth to the sacrificial fonts to get any further.

Interestingly enough one of the bunny-hunter PCs was a “Cultist”, a Chaotic Evil demon worshipper character class. This became relevant when Captain Ahab, the NPC leader of the hunting party, demanded for a volunteer to have their tooth pulled by force; Ahab was happy to do the pulling, particularly when Huru the combat engineer loaned him some thieves’ tools for it. The suspicions of the rest of the party may have been stoked by the eagerness of the Cultist in volunteering. I did take the player aside at this point (this is when he determined that his character was actually the loyal disciple of Ahab here) to reveal Ahab’s true identity and agenda to his loyal servant.

The sacrifice of the living tooth did indeed allow the door to open, enabling the party to enter a fresh part of the dungeon. The party was fairly big on hunting the rabbit at this point, which in practice meant wasting a fair amount of time wandering around the worryingly extensive burial crypts looking for the occasional signs of its passing. It’s interesting how the party didn’t stumble upon any of the actual eggs in the crypts; just didn’t spend much time looking around, intent as they were on following the trail.

Ultimately following the Bunny’s trail started losing its luster, perhaps because the players figured out that it really just had ran around just about everywhere, and the crypts didn’t seem to be otherwise meaningful. Fortunately the party had a second clue as to where to go: the susurrus that seemed to subsume the entire location, above-ground and underneath, seemed to be coming from a specific direction within the shrine’s corridors. So that’s something to investigate, surely — remember, we’re looking for a quest item, and the Bunny’s tracks go that way as well, so yeah. (Here, notably: the Bunny had gone in, but hadn’t come out.)

The orientation and priorities of the party pretty much left them skipping over the rest of possible context clues and helpful items available in the shrine, as they beelined to the sanctum where both the susurrus and the rabbit seemed to have gone. Therein they discovered the source of the susurrus, and also the strange tangled blockage of that suspicious vent they’d discovered above-ground: a great ambiguously alive bush of thorns, growing as a full thicket that blocked the entire corridor. The Easter Bunny had apparently crawled through (as a rabbit does, I imagine I don’t need to explain the logic on this one), but for the adventurers… well, they found that approaching and chopping at the tangle quickly sent it writhing — the thing was alive and sentient, capable of defending itself!

This was Aku the Akuma’s chance to shine: he originally learned his magical discipline among some Sunndian fire-wizards (a specific cult called the “Cult of the Eternal Flame”), and had in fact prepared Burning Hands today. The perfect tool for burning this darn over-grown bush down! It was in fact vulnerable to fire and while hacking at it from up close was dangerous due to its sharp fiberglass-like vines, there was little that the bush could do against what amounts to a fire-thrower.

The party had finally reached the sanctum! There was a weird hole in the floor, an altar with a bunch of items on it (including two books!), a giant skeleton for the sake of decoration… Hey, this must be the place from that painting? There’s even goblets on the altar, eh? How profound. It is barely remarkable that the keening noise, the susurrus of the bush, has ceased for good after Aku burned it down so thoroughly.

Perhaps more intriguingly, they also found the Easter Bunny! The poor mindless(?) creature had forced its way here, and who knows what happened to it… off-hand seemed like it had bled on the altar, and continued bleeding, and pulled its now-dead carcass to the side of the room. Dead as a doornail. Maybe it’d killed itself with the sacrificial dagger that was still on the altar.

The players were quite the busy bees here as they spent a Turn most carefully studying the room and the altar for any possible traps… and then another Turn butchering the Easter Bunny. Strangely Captain Ahab, who’d been depicted earlier as a single-mindedly obsessed bunny-hunter, paid no attention at all to the Bunny now that he had its corpse here. Ahab was instead all about the altar and the books.

So yeah, the players didn’t exactly hurry. Finally their standing guard noticed strange scraping sounds coming down the corridor. This was when the penny dropped for most of them, and when they started hurrying out of the doomed place, they could in fact see the peculiar door handles of the crypts turning slowly as the numberless dead within strove to free themselves from their imprisonment. Apparently penetrating the sanctum had somehow sent the dead buried in the crypts into a state of restlessness. Aku even correctly deduced that it was the susurrus of that plant being that had kept them down so far.

What followed was a feverish dungeon warfare sequence, as most of the party rushed to run out of the shrine before the undead horde could swarm the corridors. Some nice tactical plays in there, including Aku the Akuma’s successful dash out of the way of the first warrior zombies. While the rest of the party was stuck fighting the ever-condensing masses, Aku went running, laughing, free, with the Koraktor he’d grabbed from the altar firmly on hand!

A lot of detailed maneuver followed, with some adventurers falling to the horde, others fighting their way through against the odds, and one particularly unfortunate fellow casting Spider Climb and escaping through that vent from before, only to be accosted by ghouls up in the graveyard.

One of the exceptional details in the events was that Aku, who had escaped the underground shrine, found himself first in the cabin proper. He witnessed the ghouls that had already dug themselves up from under the ground, and were now wandering around the graveyard, scattering slowly across the area. Aku made a decisive tactical call here, namely decided to leg it. A fatal mistake, as he had to cover something like half a mile to get out of sight of the hungry monsters… monsters that could run tirelessly after him. Failing to somehow obscure his passing, Aku was quick to be caught up and torn apart, with the Koraktor frustratingly falling there with the leader of the expedition.

The rest of the survivors of the immediate circumstance were split in two groups: one consisted of a pair of particularly martial and level-headed characters who outright fought and tackled their way out of the shrine some minutes after Aku; those minutes made the difference between having to pass zero zombies vs a dozen, so not a trivial feat. These braves would make it to the cabin above-ground alive.

The other survivor group was a tad stranger: Captain Ahab, you see, was a CE Cleric on his own account, a peer to Melchior the Black, the grandmaster of Beast Society and Aku’s quest-giver. His presence here (besides being arbitrary Easter scenario-building) went back to the backstory of why the Koraktor was in this place, and so on — the players had some sense of this, but it never occurred to them that somebody else besides Melchior might have wanted to claim the Koraktor.

Ahab was obviously prepared with Protection from Undead just for this eventuality, and he was amiable enough to rescue a few survivors as well. His Cultist disciple, of course, and whatnot. Ahab’s brand of magic used the Cultist’s flesh as the medium for drawing up long-fairly lasting enchantments on the spot, in bloody carving, so that worked out for them, more or less. Ahab chose to set up shop in the sanctum for now, pretty much ignoring the undead hordes that were of no concern to him. (In reality not so much because of his supreme magic as because of his youth having burned out all terror of death from the man. Made him seem awfully confident to the PCs, of course.)

The rest of the scenario ended up progressing in the way that these stupid messes go when everything goes wrong. The two groups of survivors didn’t know of each other at first, but with the cabin crew unable to leave the cabin (they saw what happened to Aku, and didn’t particularly feel like trying to win a running contest with ghouls) and Ahab’s team unwilling to leave the area without the Koraktor, a peculiar encounter occurred two days after the dead rose: Cultist and the half-orc ex-slave (who was still miraculously hanging in there despite clearly having no clue about what was going on and where he was) climbed up through the vent-hole into the graveyard and started canvassing the ground for something. The cabin crew saw this, and in due time the two remnants of the expedition joined up. The Cultist was of course looking for Koraktor, protected as he was by the flesh-carved runes of Captain Ahab’s.

The technical scenario circumstances of all this were quite convoluted, to be clear. Imagine the protection effect that allowed Cultist to move amongst the undead horde to be something that prevented the undead from coming closer than ten feet… but didn’t prevent them from approaching that far. So any time Cultist showed himself, that caused literally hundreds if not thousands of ghouls and zombies in the immediate vicinity to form this teeming maelstrom of undead around him. Inherently extremely dangerous to anybody who wasn’t themself close enough to the Cultist.

So the dumb conclusion: the PCs get together, and it just happens to be the case that the cabin crew saw roughly where Aku fell with the Koraktor. Quite valuable information when everybody’s situation in the middle of this zombie apocalypse here is kinda precarious and maybe even Ahab doesn’t want to be spending indefinitely long here trying to figure out where the book ended up. So you’d think that the various parties have an obvious team-up chance here, with Cultist (and ultimately his master, Ahab) saving these other adventurers and bringing them down off the mountain in exchange for help in procuring the book.

Except of course player-to-player diplomacy failure occurs, and what instead happens is that the Cultist is a bit cagey about things, they dicker over the exact sequence of cooperation, and then Cultist decides that hey, he’ll go back down to check this with the boss… and the others attack him on the spot, because damn you’re leaving us here with thousands of ghouls in the immediate vicinity, with nothing but this cabin hiding us from them right outside.

The PCs aren’t any of them in top shape at this point, but Cultist was particularly unlucky and went down dead after a short skirmish. I think he blew his Eldritch Blast in Sipi’s Commoner cockroach who consequently died there as well? Anyway, you’d think that the team is now fucked beyond all recognition, but no: apparently Cultist’s body still repels undead even after he’s dead!

So thus concluded our Death Frost Doom experience: three living PCs carried a corpse down the mountain, followed and surrounded by a ravenous horde of ghouls that would sure have liked to get to these living morsels of humanity. The horde had to travel over some fairly challenging terrain to get help and not just perish… better would have been had they perished, really, as anywhere they’d land would surely be destroyed by the undead following them down the mountain.

State of the Productive Facilities

I’m writing every day (except game days; let’s not get crazy here), and cleaning the house and setting up the garden for summer. This is what it must be to be like a functional human being. It’d be great to be this energetic and focused all the time.

I’m still running behind on newsletters, but perhaps I’ll catch up while simultaneously finishing the editing on Muster. More of a sane way to approach this thing, feels like.