Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 26 Aug 2018

Characters
Meriwether (cavalryman, 1st level Cleric)
played by American John
 
Louis Black (politician, 1st level Warrior)
played by Petra
 
Nell (innkeeper, 1st level Warrior)
Archibald (innkeeper, 1st level Zombie)
played by Todd

Pemberton Nimby (sage)
Caspar the Freemason (magician)
Melchior the Freemason (magician)
Abendego the Freemason (magician)
NPC allies
  
  
Session 5
The Freemasons are back! And they spent the last week telling tales in every bar in town. How their statue is the demon queen Hezzemuth, how they met two demon disciples (a pair of beautiful Spanish sisters, no less!), how they caught them an Illuminatus assassin who planned to kill them for their statue, and how now they was fixing to sacrifice him to the demon Hezzemuth way down in the Maw. Nell and Meriwether spent the week rolling their eyes and trying to avoid hearing yet another re-telling of the masons' story by yet another besotted yokel.
  
Louis Black come back into town with a tall tale of his own. He told an almost unbelievable story about how he'd been holed up in the brothel when the mice arrived, how everybody was trapped inside by the vermin, how he single-handedly fought a duel to defeat the Mouse King who was laying siege to the brothel (like something out of the Nutcracker ballet!), and how he was hailed as the hero of the hour when he won, and sent all them mice packing back out of Brimstone. Nell rolled her eyes at this too, but poor innocent Meriwether believed every word.
  
Louis Black professed himself powerful curious to see Archibald returned from the dead, and agreed to help the others in retrieving demon ore to pay off Pemberton Nimby. After waiting the seven days Nimby'd said he'd need, they escaped all the praise the townsfolk were lavishing on their hated rivals, and headed over to the hospital tent just outside the city limits were Pemberton resided. When they arrived, miracle of miracles! - Archibald was sitting upright. His skin was still pale as death, and he didn't seem to blink much, (or breathe much ... or at all) but he had definitely returned to some kind of life, turning to look at his friends and smiling when he saw them. Nell rubbed her hands together greedily. "Now you gone pay, Archibald," cackled Nell, "now you gone repay me for all the unkindness I suffered!" Louis Black, unable to remember any incidents of Archibald's unkindness, shot a quizzical look at Meriwether, who just shrugged. Ever since his head injury in the War, it seemed everyone remembered stuff better'n he did. Nell grabbed one of Nimby's drills, hopped up on a stool, and drilled a hole right down the center of Archibald's skull, and before he could react, stuffed an unlit torch into the cavity. "I like brains?" Archibald asked. "Now none your sass talk, Archibald," Nell scolded him, "you're gone work off your debt to me down in them mines."
  

Pemberton Nimby returning the immobile Archibald to un-life, more or less.

  
After reassuring Nimby that they would recover the demon ore to pay him, Nell received Archibald's new blackstone heart, which she strung on a necklace and tucked under her shirt. The quartet rode out of town and back to the nameless, abandoned mine. Archibald behaved remarkably docilely, following Nell's lead, and only rarely speaking up. When he did talk, his mouth often worked silently for awhile before he got any words out, and all he could muster were different intonations of "I like brains". Louis and Meriwether weren't sure if Nell could really understand the poor dead man's intentions, or if she were just well used to ignoring whatever words actually came outta his mouth in favor of her own interpretation.
 
Back in the mine, Meriwether again suggested checking the secondary shaft. Nell ignored him, insisted that there were unseen areas off the main shaft, and lit the torch held in Archibald's head-sconce. "I like brains!" he protested in an anxious voice, but Nell just laughed at him. The ventured down the main shaft to the only unexplored room, where the floor was covered with loose rocks and the walls were gouged and scored. A quick glance around revealed that everything of value had been removed. "I told you we should have-" Meriwether started, but Nell cut him off. "Now Archibald, don't you contradict me! You get your lazy hide back down out into that hall!" Archibald looked confused. "I like brains?"
  
As the group re-entered the main shaft and reoriented themselves to return toward the entrance, a dog-sized shrimp clambered up from the caverns below and began charging toward them. All three of the armed companions opened fire on the pale crustacean, but it scuttled deceptively fast on its many legs. It reared up on Louis Black, knocking him to the ground and standing on his chest. Louis wrestled with the beast as its many mouth parts tried to grasp his face. Archibald lurched to help Louis, but Nell shouted him down, "Not now, Archibald! Stay out the way!", and the dead man stepped back out of the way. "I like brains." Meriwether and Nell fired at the shrimp as it wrastled Louis Black, and only narrowly missed shooting their friend. Louis had an ace in the hole though, as he wrestled, he clanged his wrists together with the sound of a bell. "Myow myow," he intoned, and a visible wave of sound emanated from his magical cat-faced gauntlets, lifting the shrimp into the air, killing it, and shaking its body free of its shell. Nell handed the shrimp's body to Archibald to carry, aiming to eat the denuded critter at the first opportunity.
  
Returning to the entryway and then venturing down the secondary shaft, the group discovered demon ore in the first room they entered. Nell threw her hat in the air, too happy with the find to even scold Archibald on account of Meriwether being a know-it-all. She did set her servant to digging though, as it would take at a couple hours to extract the four visible nodes of the accursed material. While Archibald dug, Louis grilled the giant shrimp over a small campfire, and the three living friends enjoyed a leisurely lunch. After lunch, and with the ore safely stored in a large sack tied round Archibald's neck, they continued their explorations. Unfortunately, as they entered the next room, they heard a familiar snapping and crumbling sound, and the doorway collapsed behind them, trapping them inside. Nell immediately set Archibald to digging them all back out, but the task looked to take several hours. A quick search revealed a hole where dripping water had worn through the floor to the cavern below, so the once again used rope and grappling hook to descend.
  
They lowered themselves into a room with a large pool of water, managing to drop right next to the water rather than inside it. Meriwether waded into the pool to see how deep it got, and noticed that it sloped slightly downward before spilling over a ledge into another cave below. He nearly got caught in a strong under-current, but managed to keep his footing and waded back to shore. With very little light from Archibald's torch coming down through the skylight, they lit Nell's lantern before moving on.
  
The next room they found was almost too narrow it enter. It would have been a tight fit, squeezing through sideways, so they decided to pass it by.
  
In the next cave, they found another waterfall pouring down from the ceiling, forming a small pool in the floor. Louis speculated that some of these waterways must be connected somehow, and Meriwether advised that if that was so, they'd best watch out for the reclining lizard creatures he and Nell had seen on their previous trip.
  
The next cave had a low ceiling and would have forced them all to crawl on hands and knees, so they bypassed it too.
  
They found a cave where stalactites on the ceiling stretched almost all the way to the floor, looking like an inverted pine forest. Nell and Meriwether drew their guns and eyed the stones carefully, but none moved.
  
The main tunnel they were following dead-ended at a kind of chute. The whole cavern complex must have been carved by some racing underground river, long ago. The three slid down carefully to arrive at a lower level the complex. Still more small caves split off from the main tunnel. The first cave was more like a side tunnel, it curved and wound farther back than they cared to go.
  
In the next cave they entered, they found two more fossils embedded in the walls. These looked like ovals, almost, ancient bug creatures with triangular heads and a thousand ribs or legs running the entire length of their central spine. Nell used a mining pick to start digging them out, while Meriwether and Louis kept watch.
  
Feeling bored, Louis went ahead to explore a little more on his own. He entered a new cave only to discover that the ceiling height dipped rapidly as he entered. He was down in a crouch and debating whether to crawl further when he heard the screaming.
  
It was lucky for Nell that she's left a sentry, because that meant it was Meriwether and not she who faced what came next. Down the tunnel, from the direction of the chute, came a weird critter that looked just like one of them fossils, only larger. It's triangular head was like a shield, with two great antennae swept back off the sides. Its thousand legs rippled like water, but it was the front two that Meriwether was watching, for the front two legs had scythes like the Grim Reaper his-self. Meriwether tried to take aim, but he was too slow, and the beast were upon him, mowing through him with those great horrible scythes. Nell heard Meriwether's wet strangled cries, turned, and opened fire on the critter, and Louis Black came running. He drew his elephant gun and laid waste to the beast, sending its great weird body flying backward down the hall, dead. Louis and Nell rushed to Meriwether's side, and rolled him over where he'd fallen face first on the cavern floor, but only the top half of him rolled. His abdomen had been cut in half, his torso and face shredded to ribbons. Without much talking, Nell gathered his belongings, especially the magical dagger and demon statue, and finished prying the fossils from the wall. She stooped to pick up Meriwether's legs, and Louis tried to collect his torso, but it was too torn up to easily carry. The two remaining friends trudged up the natural tunnel back to the secondary mind shaft. They found Archibald, who'd finished digging free of the earlier cave-in. "I like brains?" he asked, and they showed him Meriwether's legs, and Nell shook her head sadly. "I ... I like brains." Together the three rode back to Brimstone, with Meriwether's horse following riderless behind.
  
Returning to Brimstone and Pemberton Nimby's hospital tent, Louis Black and Nell paid the doctor his two stones of demon ore. Nell asked if he could resurrect Meriwether's legs so that she could mount a board on them and make a mobile side-table, and the idea seemed to briefly cheer her up, but Nimby claimed he would only be able to do traditional taxidermy. They left the un-dead Archibald with Nimby for safekeeping and rode back into town. Nell stopped briefly along the way to dump Meriwether's severed legs in a ditch. "He wouldn't want no Christian burial," she explained to Louis. At the Gallows bar, Nell and Louis tried to drink away their sorrows, when who should come in but the three Freemasons? "Well met!" exclaimed one of the architects upon seeing Louis. "Look sharp lads, it's the hero of the brothel!" The Freemasons insisted on buying Nell and Louis drinks, and the five of 'em got to talking. Turns out the Masons knew all about their adventures down the Maw! Turns out they would be honored to have some seasoned and experienced ore-hunters with them when they went to perform their human sacrifice! "It could be fun, right?" said Louis. "It sounds kind of cool." Nell felt the weight of Meriwether's dagger and statue in her pockets. She thought about her friend's innocent, naive love for necromancy and the occult. "What the hell boys!" she decided, "let's summon us a demon!"
  
  
Gains
zombie Archibald
2 trilobite fossils
4 nuggets of demon ore (2 paid to Nimby, 2 retained)
  
Losses
Meriwether (bisected by trilobite)
  
XP
1 XP for claw shrimp
4 XP for demon ore
2 XP for fossils
2 XP for scythe trilobite
11 XP for exploring 11 new rooms
Total: 20 XP each
  
Running graveyard (and session of death)
Meriwether the 1st level Cleric (5), Archibald the 1st level Thief (3), Officer Shia "the Beef" the NPC Mexian police-officer (2), Daniel the plumber (2), Officer Benicio "the Bull" the NPC Mexican police-officer (2), Luther the factory-hand (2), Jed the miner (1), Henry the huckster (1), Lilly the clerk (1), Bill the livery-stabler (1), Harry the butcher (1), Rusty the auctioneer (1)
  
  
Post-mortem
Poor John, he's lost the most characters of anyone in this campaign. This session, he provided Archibald's voice while Todd (via Nell) decided what Archibald's body would do. The zombie class Archibald got resurrected as is something I wrote for David Coppoletti's DCC Class Alphabet (you can see a preview by looking at the Working Class Alphabet from bygrinstow). He knows a few new tricks that hopefully will come up in play soon.
  
I was really curious to see where Meriwether's fascination with Camazotz the Death Bat would lead him, but I guess we'll never know, now. That's the thing about playing lethal games. Characters die. And characters die even though they might have some interesting personal narrative going that makes you wish they could have stayed alive. The magical bat-tooth dagger they found has been used a couple times. So far no one has dared to really try using the statue to invoke Camazotz, but it remains in their possession, so someone could make an attempt in the future. The ongoing MVP of magic items are those cat-faced gauntlets, and Petra has used them with Louis every time she's played.
  
It's interesting to me how the situation with the Freemasons has developed. After playing through the first session of the campaign, I wanted to pre-generate a couple mini-dungeons to place down inside the Maw. Black Powder Black Magic vol 4 lists "demon shrine" and "point of interest" as two possible discoveries, so I made one of each, using BPBM4 and Mad Monks of Kwantoom to make the shrine and Ruins of the Undercity to generate the point of interest. BPBM4 suggested that a human sacrifice might be going on when the characters entered the shrine, but I decided to figure that out later. In session 2, Dreams in the Lich House's random campaign events generator I was using gave us "bragging rights," which says "An NPC group gets farther into the dungeons than the PCs and starts bragging about their exploits.  This is a chance to foreshadow some of the deeper dungeon areas and create a rivalry." Perfect, we get some slapstick comedy from the townsfolk over-the-top loving the rivals, and a chance to foreshadow one of the two minidungeons. I rolled on BPBM4's faction table and got "Freemason architects," decided that a demon shrine wold be the more architecturally interesting of the two locations, and then rolled to randomly place it in one of the first-level hexes inside the Brimstone Mine. (My original plan, rather than placing it in a specific hex, was just to have it ready in case they encountered it at random while exploring.) 
  
That same session, the characters encountered a "lost pack animal" with "foreign currency" as its treasure - this became a pair of donkeys with some Mexican pesos on them. When they later had a faction encounter, I decided the donkeys belonged to the faction members. I rolled "Pinkerton detectives" but decided they must be Mexican police because of the pesos. The police were chasing someone, so I rolled again, and ended up with cultists of Hezzemuth. At this point the scenario practically wrote itself. The Masons discovered the shrine by accident, where they met the two cultists, and together they were going to conduct a human sacrifice. I guess I could have decided that the cultists were going to sacrifice one or more of the Masons, but I liked the idea of them as recurring rivals. At this point, I still planned that all this would play out when the players encountered the shrine (which admittedly, they could do faster now that they basically knew where it was). 
  
Then this week, I got "bragging rights" again. So rather than wait for things to unfold, I had the Masons talk up their plan to the whole town, which again, for comedy purposes, enthusiastically cheered them on. So the sacrifice is going down! I don't know for sure if my players will participate, try to prevent it, or get distracted and allow it to happen off-camera, but I'm prepared for any of those alternatives. One thing that's no longer on the table is just waiting for them to enter the shrine on their own before advancing the story. If they ditch the Masons and then go back to the shrine several sessions later, they're not going to interrupt the sacrifice, it's already going to have happened.
  
The mine this week is the one I generated before using Melancholies & Mirths' abandoned mine generator. 11 rooms in 2 hours is a pretty impressive amount of exploration, especially with all the characterization hijinks going on. One thing I wished I'd done differently, while running this, was handling my room descriptions a little better. Really the only thing going on in this dungeon was all the "trick" rooms. I knew that I didn't want to force the players to roll every time to discover the trick or not. If they looked for it, they would find it. However, I felt like I was almost too forthcoming, and maybe I was taking all the mystery out of the place. I recently read The Alexandrian's matryoshka search technique, which he explains "Instead of immediately discovering the item of interest, the character instead discovers an indicator pointing in the direction of the item of interest. The advantage is that it allows (and even requires) the player to receive information and then draw a conclusion." Instead of searching under a bed and then hearing "You find a secret trap door in the floor", instead you search under a bed and hear "There are scuff marks on the floor around the legs of the bed", which means the bed has been moved, which means you'll move it too, which means you'll discover the trap door. Anyway, that's the idea, although I'll probably have to practice to get it right. But hopefully I can do a better job of describing what they see, without arbitrarily hiding important information, while still allowing a bit of mystery and discovery.