Rotvalan Reveries Ep6: Scissors vs Paper

Run Date: June 2, 2024

PCs
Helena: Lv3 Bladedancer (WTW)
Gwendolyn: Lv3 Fighter
Antony: Lv2 Mage
Friedrick: Lv1 Mage
Zjane Zjulin: Lv1 Ruinguard
MaryMae: Lv2 Bard
Dex: Lv1 Thief

Hench
Harshnik: Lv1 Barbarian
Todd, definitely not a demon barber
Francois the crossbowman
Mercedes
Lothor
Eduardo

Scissors vs Paper

As you can see, we had a pretty large group today. This doesn’t include the extra 30 or so Mercenaries in Antony’s employ. Among the newbies are some returning oldies and one person who’s never touched an RPG before. Despite what some may believe, it is much easier to teach a new person when they don’t have “40 years of experience.” No terribly ingrained bad habits to break makes for a much easier time.

The players spent some time catching each other up on recent happenings and figuring out what their plan for the session was. We’re all scrubs here, and I think this size of group could have used a proper caller. It wasn’t as rough as I expected due to having several leader-types more or less run the show, but Zjane and Dex did end up dropping later due to various reasons. Today’s mission was visiting the Sunken Shrine of the Golden Sun. Helena had informed Antony about the situation regarding Ryder’s Roughnecks, and Antony wanted to assert his claim of the place through Don Serrano’s writ. Simple enough, I thought. Let’s check the weather at the Iberian Peninsula… Ah, thunderstorms? Fun.

I’ve been slacking on considering weather effects during travel and boy did I choose a good day to enforce it. The first day of travel was thankfully just a drizzle. Since it takes a little over a day to get to the shrine, camp was built and watches were set. Some strange maybe-demon spiders visited and attempted to communicate with Gwendolyn, but quickly turned hostile when she didn’t respond in kind. This was a weird one to adjudicate for me since the creatures are usually ambush predators, but rolled well on their Reaction. Since they could speak and understand certain dead languages, I ruled they’d attempt to make contact with the party; perhaps thinking they were sent by their Great Master or something, I dunno. The fight went pretty quick since there was only 3 of them and the party won out on initiative. Gwendolyn continues her streak as a smasher with her morningstar and the Manes did some work on the others.

The following day, the sky opened up and the slog to the shrine was miserable. Arriving at the site revealed that Ryder’s men had started building a simple palisade around the primary entrance. Helena took the lead for this negotiation and had a chat with some familiar faces. The previous visit, she had offered to pay for the treatments of any of the Roughnecks’ sickness due to clearing out the diseased Hobs. Before the group headed inside, the Roughnecks took the chance to tell Helena they’d killed some mad gorillas that came from the forest. They joked about how they tasted and that was that. GM Note: For outsiders, this situation reinforced two notes about the game and this area’s situation. The first is that the shrine is rolling encounters per the Vagaries of Incursion. This simulates whether or not something comes through and ousts the Roughnecks. The second is that animals in the woods, and especially near the shrine, may be engulfed in a rabid fury. Still waiting for the Rabid Roe to make their appearance, but prey seem to be more resistant to the effects.

The negotiations with Ryder took quite a while. There was a pre-conversation before their actual meeting reviewing the conditions and goals of their negotiations. MaryMae would be acting as Antony’s steward in an attempt at presenting him as “a wealthy and successful mage.” This is the part where I remembered that a caller can help keep things on track, but far be it from me to tell the group to hurry their asses up. It’s their negotiation, I’m just here to adjudicate. The quick and simple of the actual negotiation is that Antony had the paperwork stating this was his land and project. Ryder, being the leader of a raiding band, laughed at the implication that paper gave any right to anything without the proper arms to say otherwise. To note, Ryder’s description suggests a former noble or man of rank; a neutral leading a bunch of chaotic woodsmen. This added complications to the negotiations and honestly I have no idea if I played everything off properly. There was a moment during this that Antony was tempted to throw his hands up and summon one of his demons to solve the problem. The players laughed at the implications and were in agreement. I’m surprised they didn’t execute on it.

Ryder wanted a proper fort and had no issues leaving the shrine if they found something better. The Roughnecks enjoy their plunder and don’t care about the targets; something Antony planned on turning into profit for himself. Antony wanted his shrine and to start fortifying it for a domain. He also had some extra funds he was willing to offer to Ryder and his men to “attack targets of interest.” The party set out with their new goal of searching the wilderness for targets and potential forts. The thunderstorms raged on.

After staying the night at the shrine (Helena continued her wooing), the party set out the following morning. Their veritable platoon slogged through the woods with their pathfinder at the head. They came across a meadow of beautiful golden flowers that Friedrick quickly identified as Goldenrod. Everyone was put to work harvesting and storing it. There’s nothing like a large group of armed men and women picking flowers in the rain. (MaryMae made a joke about a Steven Seagal movie that did something similar?)

After some time the party discovered another field of Goldenrods that appeared to be run down and picked. My proper description was vague enough to catch some of them off guard: they were lost and had circled back. Antony berated his pathfinder for a bit before they reformed and tried again. By nightfall, the group had found themselves in the forest hills.

The following morning, the party continued their march northward and found a lake. They had some time left in the day and weighed their options. They soon settled on doing some proper lair hunting. The berated Pathfinder again took the lead. The group found little of interest in their first hour, but as they marched around the corner of a narrow path on the side of a rocky slope, they stumbled across a supermodel blonde woman in tigerskin toga with a tiger companion. A few from the front ranks were surprised, but the others initiated a conversation.

They discovered that this woman (Darla) and her mate (Hercule) were wanderers in the woods. They enjoyed the rain and the wilds like one would expect from an 80s fantasy movie. The PCs leading the conversation managed to eke out some information from the woman regarding a nearby coven of witches (little w). They were told that the witches can be quite vicious unless you bring an offering; a fresh roe or similar creature. This set off red flags for the party (“sound like hags, we should avoid that for now”), and they passed without further discussion. During all this, Antony and Helena weighed whether or not they could kill weretigers and settled on “not profitable enough.”

The group spent another couple hours wandering around before coming across an 8 foot grumpy man with flaming red eyes, yellowed teeth, and a hungry looking cleaver. The folks that weren’t surprised by this guy and his large entourage quickly identified him as a Spriggan; and a particularly vicious one. The fight began in earnest with the Manes and Light Infantry tanking the first wave. There were enough Spriggans to overwhelm and bleed into the PC frontline, heavily wounding Helena and beating on Gwendolyn. The return blows were vicious as Gwendolyn crushed damn near all of the ones in her reach with her morningstar. The PC line was quickly freed up and Antony summoned one of his new Friends.

The Spriggans had begun to falter, and were slow moving in their attempt to fall back. This allowed Antony’s Friend, who was also invisible, to move into prime position to breathe a wall of fire onto everything. This killed several infantrymen, the manes, and all but a few Spriggans; which the remaining PCs cleaned up quickly. This was a brutal fight and I’m thankful for ACKS keeping such large groups moving quickly; didn’t need two hours to adjudicate this single fight (24 vs 30+ btw).

Next came an interesting conundrum on my end. Invisible Friend uses huge fire breath and wipes out a ton of guys. Given the friendly fire, I considered this being a calamity for the Mercs. I don’t think they suffer the same sort of chance to leave that Henches do, but it seemed appropriate given the situation. However, the creature was indeed invisible and none of them know what a Friend Summoning looks like. So instead, I checked for morale to see if they’d flee from this unknown threat. They held fast and Antony quickly dismissed his Friend while suggesting they follow tracks and find if the Spriggans were holed up somewhere.

I may have discussed it last report, but there really isn’t a rule for stocking such a thing. The % in lair came up with no lair for the encounter… but what if? What if the players were already searching for lairs in an area? What if I had 3 unrolled Lairs to stock when their search roll succeeded? What if that % could be manipulated in other ways. I haven’t ironed in on this, but Arbethril of the ACKS Discord offered quite a bit of insight. Since the party was heading into the next hex and had succeeded on their tracking and search, I tossed the dice to see if the lair they found belonged to the Spriggans. Turns out, it did. Turns out, there was still a band of them in camp (-1 for the one killed, after all).

The party’s scouts managed to recon the area without being spotted; a spiral horn, perhaps unicorn, rose up from the center of an overgrown garden of white stone. The horn statue was the only identifiable piece of whatever this place was. Shorthand, but overused, I called it a shrine. The scouts had found a ridge that peered into the home and reported back to the host. Antony took some of his men around one side, Helena waited on another, and the bowmen, Friedrick, and MaryMae and her henches all huddled on the ridge. For a second time, the camp was surprised. Friedrick began casting a Fan of Flames while MaryMae and her henches rained military oil into the camp. The high ground negated the penalty from the rain. An explosion akin to a small nuke erupted, blackening the spiral horn and incinerating the band of Spriggans.

Antony cautiously marched his men into the camp, wary of having awakened a creature of eld with their fresh sacrifices. He was happy to find that no great evil had awakened. Moreover, the party was happy to find a bunch of goodies stashed in the mossy hovels of the Sprigs.

I directed the players to rolling up treasure while I adjudicated the return trip in the backround. It turns out that rolling treasure can take quite a while if you get some interesting results. Either way, the entourage evaded a camp of chubby folks with pet pigs, settled in to rest at the shrine, and worked their way back to Coxhaven.

Total time came out to something like 10 days, two of which were burned with required resting.

Rewards (Totals)

568 XP
322 GP

Afterword

Overall, this session was pretty draining. It’s been a while since I’ve run for such a large group and I had a lot of background things to roll/adjudicate. We ran up against time and I still spent about an extra hour rolling out the details of the loot recovered. I discovered an interesting hiccup, though. By having the players roll for magic items, they would necessarily have to know what the items are. This meant that Unidentified Potion becomes Potion of Shimmer “for free.” I considered a few ways around this and honestly don’t care so much as long as the appropriate prices are paid back in town.

Among the interesting grabs were a pair of treasure maps. I gave the players freebies on this end as well (in terms of deciphering) because I’ve not used the JJ’s generator yet. Credit where it is due, it is an extremely useful set of tables. I’m not so sure about how to translate it all into narrative, but the cipher types are cool and it took a lot less time to generate than I’d expected. There is some belief that information on the contents should be part of the map, though my reading of the information rolls suggests there might not be. I’ll have to feel this out as I practice it.

Finally, the group did a solid job. So far they’re all pretty chill about everything and joke with each other often enough that rapport building doesn’t seem like a problem. It’s fun to listen to.

That’s all for now. Take care.