I’m cheating on my newsletter recipe by skipping on the “main feature” and just pushing the D&D play reports this time. Call it a novel experiment, plus it’s a bit more time for me to work on other stuff. Which I clearly need, considering how I again dropped a week of newsletter to make way for more important stuff.
Coup de Main in Greyhawk
The game keeps trucking. It’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs. Come join us if you’d like:
Sunday Basic session #9 was scheduled for tonight, but it got canceled due to GM scheduling. Try again next week.
Monday Coup session #112 is scheduled for tomorrow, Monday 19.12., starting around 16:00 UTC. I’m currently GMing, and we’re doing the usual, strategic full panoply sandbox around the Selintan Valley region of Flanaess.
Coup de Main #87
Tuomas was feeling under the weather, so instead of continuing the Coup-de-Gnarley saga, I picked up the baton for a quick session at Castle Greyhawk. Greyhawk is a latter-days simile of the original D&D megadungeon (not at all similar in reality, but there’s a thematic connection), and we play it entirely like a megadungeon: quickly prepared simple expeditions into the depths for various reasons. It’s good to have a specific goal for a megadungeon like this, particularly as the Castle Zagyg material we’re playing is very treasure-poor; you won’t accomplish much in this place without a clear goal.
This party, though, has one: Frida the Teenage Witch has sort of adopted a chivalric quest from her once-benefactor, prince Viusdul. The party is looking for the “Oracle of Zagyg”, a fabled machine or aide of the Mad Archmage, to query it over the fate of the wonderful elven princess Sarana. Frida’s never had anything to do with Sarana, but she’s pretty smitten with elves in general. Prince Viusdul succumbed to elven grief (literally, died of frustration), which clearly left a mark on Frida, who is now questing for a second-hand princess!
So that’s the elfquest drama context. Frida’s picked up a bunch of murderhobos at the castle barbican, and just like that, we’re ready for some new expeditioneering into the Castle. (The one true success we’ve had regarding the Castle so far is how the adventurers seized the Castle barbican and gifted it to the local Rangers, resulting in a safe and defensible strongpoint conveniently right next to the actual Castle.)
The party started by mapping the external Castle a bit by using wizard Opioid’s Spider Climb for some easy wall-climbing. Frida got some omens encouraging her to keep exploring the Castle basement, though, so ultimately the ground level approach was discarded in favour of going back into the dungeons. Witches and their omens, eh.
The dungeons were eerily empty as the party navigated back to the burned down library. The broken and melted bronze doors here had seemed formidable before, but now a well-prepared party managed to force them open. Entrances were made into the royal baths, but what seemed like the sanctum or a magical laboratory space of the Mad Archmage was wizard-locked.
The party found some valuable gems in the baths, but was generally forced to retreat in disappointment; Frida was fairly sure that the long-searched for Oracle was behind that one last wizard-lock, but… she only managed to pull together the magics needed to breach it after returning from the dungeon!
Witch magic works through personal immersion and will, so I guess it’s not surprising that a Witch could just meet a mage-locked door for the first time ever, and then soon afterwards realize that it is a magic they have an answer for in the form of the Knock spell.
Coup in Sunndi #61
Meanwhile in Sunndi, we were taking a bit of a break from the Doom of Naerie questline on account of player scheduling. Antti, a prime mover in the Naerie quest via his character Sparrow the Paladin, often has fairly inconsistent schedules, so we get to play without him now and then. This regular irregularity has kinda encouraged a system where we play several adventuring parties side by side depending on the set of players in the session: we’ll play “your” adventure on the days you come to play, and “theirs” otherwise.
In this case “theirs” was more bounty-hunting in the anarchy-wracked failed Sunndian princely state of Dhalmond, well familiar at this point from past adventures. The deal with the bounty-hunting adventure is simple: every month a number of incorrigible criminals contribute to the awfulness of life in Dalmond, inspiring the constabulary to set up frankly extravagant monetary rewards for their capture. Dalmond is shorter on food and soldiers than it is on gold, so for now adventurers have the unique opportunity to play bounty hunting. To spice things up, a competing bounty hunter party called the Sunset Riders is after the bounties, too.
The last time we did bounty-hunting was in session #51, a couple real-time months back, so it’d been a while. The in-game month changed as well, which meant a new batch of outlaws emerging onto the Wanted-rolls of Dhalmond. The dice gave us a large number of targets, so sieving through the data set took some time. The players seemed to think that the generally-leveled criminals were for the most part far too tough for them to engage with, though.
At this point I can say that there’s a particular feature to the bounty-hunting that this party does, that is not to my mind an obvious angle: they like to sit and carefully debate their bounty target options, after which they seek to do the minimal amount of investigative legwork to find any clues to the location and particulars of their chosen target. I could imagine some other party approaching bounty-hunting more in a catch-as-catch-can fashion: set up an informant network, hang out in town doing streetwise checks, wait to see which outlaws cause a ruckus that makes it easy to find them. Choosing a target first and then ignoring the other outlaws makes the investigation a little bit more focused, so it’s not entirely useless, but I do wonder if the players are ignoring opportunities with their approach. Particularly as they tend to lock the target literally on the basis of the Wanted poster, without even rudimentary efforts to learn more first.
With the planning focused on the Wanted posters, and the players being generally risk-averse, the targeting question mainly revolved around trying to guess which criminals combined a low personal Level (conveniently printed on the Wanted poster for gameability reasons) with a small gang size. The premise seems to be that a mid-tier criminal NPC is essentially impossible to apprehend, so the party shouldn’t waste time with that. This limited the object set sharply, what with most of these criminals being roughly mid-tier.
Ultimately the choice boiled down to either going after a gang of insane apocalyptic cultists (apparently no leveled leader?), or going after Camil the Camel-Lover (2 HD), an ex-stablehand who’d discovered his talent for cattle rustling during the anarchy, and now lived a carefree highwayman life with his gang of merry men. I guess Camil seemed more manageable, so there’s the target. The reward for him was just 500 GP (ludicrously large for a bounty on a cattle-rustler, but that’s Dhalmondian bounty hunting for you), but that’s better than nothing, surely.
The party did some rudimentary legwork in town to learn more about Camil, and it seemed like apprehending the man would require going deep into the countryside to seek for his hideout. Correlating recent activities, the party figured out a rough idea of where to look, and then prepared an expedition to the war-torn countryside of Dhalmond. The idea would pretty much be to, well, hex-crawl and interview the locals for more clues. Not a bad plan, Camil is kinda recognizable and his crew might not be very good at keeping a low profile.
As happens on occasion, though, random chance waylaid the party’s plans: one of the other outlaws on the bounty lists, a foreign agent provocateur going by the name of Dandy Boy, had been provoked by the party’s street activities in Dhaltown. Dandy is a 3rd level Fighter highwayman, being paid by a neighboring princely state to specifically assault Dhalmondian royal mail; he’s a sybarite living the good life, but also a paranoid sociopath, so when his informants in town mistook the party’s information-gathering efforts as being directed at Dandy Boy, he jumped immediately to stamp down this threat to his operation.
Or, to put that in other words: a special random encounter on the road involved Dandy Boy and 4d6 of his mercenary buddies ambushing the party! The encounter was extremely dangerous and involved a major melee. The most amusing part by far was the way one of the PCs happened to possess a Wand of Magic Missiles, which they kept dinging at Dandy Boy across the distance (Dandy held back while egging his mercenaries to charge the party). So while the party’s couple of front-line combatants were doing their chanbara impression (really, it played out very similarly to a samurai vs mooks situation) with the mercenaries, this one Bard just kept pew-pewing at Dandy Boy.
Obviously a low-power Magic Missile doesn’t do much against a mid-tier Fighter, the HP pool just soaks it, but after a few applications Dandy Boy, falling to half HP, decided that enough was enough and made to retreat, taking his mercenaries with him. It was totally an encounter Dandy Boy could have won if he didn’t make it so easy to use that magic wand to threaten him!
This was a good point to end the session. Left the players some time to think about their bounty-hunting plans in more detail.
State of the Productive Facilities
I’ve been doing some end-of-year book-keeping stuff; boring and it sure takes me a lot of time to do things I don’t want to do. I also squared the accounts with Sipi over the Muster illustration job, so that’s not nothing. And I produced the color hardcover layout for Muster, might as well get that to the POD printer (although I’ll need to get a ISBN for it first, it needs a new number).
If all goes well and I don’t again lose all will to work, I’ll order the next round of proofs from the printer as soon as the ISBN arrives, so probably Monday or Tuesday or something like that. After that it’s another couple of weeks of waiting for the proofs to arrive and… well, fortunately I’m pretty sure that nobody’s happiness is hanging on the knife’s edge over getting a physical print copy of Muster, because this entire POD process seems to take its own sweet time.
A magical missile per round is nothing to sneeze at. After all, it hits automatically, so even a d4+1 is quite decent, especially for a bard.
How could Dandy have made it more difficult to hit him with magic missile?
That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I mean, you’re absolutely correct about Magic Missile being dangerous. If Dandy wasn’t such a bad-ass himself, he couldn’t have brushed it off as he did. The player was making a very good play, even if I kinda made a point of joking about it as it happened due to the mismatch between the attack and the defense. It took I think three hits for Dandy to decide to back down; not near death, but near enough to near-death for him. Dandy didn’t become a 3rd level spy-saboteur without having some common sense.
Had he known about Magic Missile here (and he’s not the most occult of people, so he’d need to have somebody actually read him up on how it works), here’s some obvious stuff that Dandy could have done:
– Not make it so obvious who’s the leader; him being a stylish, well, dandy, made it kinda obvious who was running the show.
– Not prance around on horseback behind his men; being separate like that instead of joining the crowd made it even easier to target him. Also easier for him to retreat (run away), of course.
The only reason the Magic Missile was relevant at all with its relatively low DPR at the scale of the fight was specifically that the enemy had set themselves up for a decapitation attack like that.
Considering it more generally, a force armed with Magic Missile vs a force armed with melee weaponry is a little bit like early modern age gun vs melee warfare, except MM has different strengths and weaknesses compared to guns. (Higher rate of fire and accuracy, overall less lethal and likely to be present in less numbers; which has a more difficult supply situation depends on stuff.) Success for the melee side has been very possible historically, to the extent that some of the most fearsome early 18th century armies were predominantly melee. But you absolutely have to be able to maneuver decisively and when time comes to charge, the charge must finish.
Most versions of *magic missile* I’m familiar with auto-hit a select target regardless of cover, kinda like a homing missile.
This is a big deal in my current game because I’ve introduced random targeting in melee and banned firing into melee.
In any case, not giving away who the leader is makes a lot of sense, especially for small, tight-knit groups.