Session Report - Shootout at the Irontown Corral - 29 March 2019

Characters
Chaus Hussar (cavalryman, 2nd level Wizard)
- played by Peter

Tomas Antonio de Carlos Ortega (shoemaker, 1st level Knave of Diamonds)
- played by Todd

Milton J Pennypacker (banker)
Phineas Cole (railroad man)
Molly Oatcakes (farmer)
Alexander Smokes (cigar maker)
- played by Josh


Session 10 - 29 March 2019
After the fall of Brimstone and her party's excursion to the Gold Soul Mines, Sweet Nell headed off for Chicago to put on a Vaudevillian ventriloquist act using Mr Archibald as her "dummy". The pair ended up mentoring some new folks back east who'd decided to travel out west into the demon-haunted Dark Territories ... but that's a tale for another day. (And frankly, for another blog, if Todd chooses to tell it. He recently started running his own Brimstone campaign using the funnel from Black Powder Black Magic volume 1, and repurposing Nell and Archibald and NPCs.)

Meanwhile Chaus followed the same trail the refugees from the ghost town had, lo those many decades ago, and eventually arrived in Irontown, where he was happily received, as there was something wrong with the iron mine. Local banking magnate Milton J Pennypacker was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, and he'd recruited a handful of expendable cannon fodders civic minded volunteers to help investigate. It seemed the iron in the mine was actually growing (which was good!) and also that almost everyone who went in didn't make it back out alive (which was not!) They were also joined by Tomas Antiono, an inveterate gambler, borne on the wings of chance, who somehow knew Sweet Nell and Archibald, and claimed to have won some interesting fossils off her in a casual, friendly, high-stakes card game.

Asking around town, Chaus met a few people who'd been into the mine and made it out alive, and learned of a ghostly woman who seemed to be made of golden light. He thought he recognized the description as another gold-soul ghost like he'd encountered before. Milton was also aware of a rumor of cruel men made of rust patrolling the shafts, and no sir, he wasn't going to stand for it! "Why these men stand in the way of good honest industry! This cannot be allowed to continue!" Together, the six new companions made their way to the entrance of the mine.

The ground out front was covered in sand, and veins of iron were indeed extending out of the mine onto the outer cliff walls. The veins seemed to pulse to some silent, internal rhythm, and almost imperceptibly lengthened as the group stood watching them. Chaus, who'd thought ahead and purchased a rock hammer and some mason jars to collect samples, bent down close to inspect the iron. It seemed almost like mercury, like liquid metal there in the wall, and was pliable and ductile beneath his hammer. As soon as he scraped any off into a jar though, it seemed to harden instantly to become normal metallic iron. Molly Oatcakes was curious how much give the liquid metal had, and she pressed a potato into it. The metal gave way and made a hollow for the potato, eventually, it seemed as though it was beginning to grow over, or maybe even through, the plant. Molly thought she still had time to pull it out, but decided to leave it there, and rather than fall to the ground, the potato continued to be slowly, slowly incorporated into wall.

The group discussed the similarity to the veins in the human body, and the way iron-rich blood flows through those, but before they could become too philosophical, Chaus stood up and cast a magical spray of colors directly at the iron vein. Almost instantly, the whole interior of the mine lit up before them, in rainbow colors that rotated red, orange, yellow, green blue, violet, then red again. To Tomas Antonio, it looked like the new electrified neon-gas lights that had recently been installed in all the finest casinos in Chicago. To everyone else, it looked like a rainbow was lighting up the mine.

Milton shoved Phineas to the fore, and he bravely volunteered to lead the group into the now-glowing mine. As soon as they stepped inside, they heard a sound that had been inaudible before, a sound like waves breaking on the ocean, or like sheet metal wobbling as someone shook it. Though rainbow colored, the room was nearly as bright as daylight thanks to Chaus's spell. One whole wall was literally covered in soft, liquid iron, now coruscating with light. They saw two one passage leading off to their right, another mostly straight ahead, and a third to the right that appeared to be filled knee-deep with gravel. They briefly strategized and decided to explore the easiest-to-reach rooms before entering the gravel-filled passageway.

The group entered the right-hand room, and found it entirely covered in pulsing, coruscating liquid iron, almost blindingly bright because of the rainbow magic illuminating it. On the floor was the indistinct silhouette of something dead. Tomas crouched down to investigate the body and discerned that it was a skinless pit pony, and that tendrils of iron had grown up from the floor and were penetrating the dead animal's flesh, growing into its actual veins. Looking at the pitiful creature, he felt woozy, but chalked it up to the horror of what he was looking at. Chaus bent down to take a closer look as well and promptly fainted dead away. Molly carefully reached out for Chaus with her rake and pulled him closer. She felt a wave of vertigo as well, but maintained her footing, and the entire group retreated back to the very first room.

With a slight breeze of fresh air blowing in from outside, the Molly managed to revive Chaus without difficulty, but as she did so, a man made of an assemblage of chips and flakes of rust came out of the room after them. He locked eyes with Chaus, who scurried up to his feet. The man scurried forward, and Chaus was sure that this strange creature was mocking him and imitating his movements. Chaus continued to back up toward the entrance, and the rust man followed, mincing and mocking as he drew ever closer. At the mouth of the mine, Chaus simply ran for it, and the man, now blocking the entrance and trapping the others inside, turned to face the rest of the group. Milton loudly cursed Chaus for his lamentable cowardice.

Alerted by Milton's insult, Chaus turned and saw that the man had stopped following him, and cast a colorful spray of magic directly into the rust-being's back. The creature was lightly wounded, and also seemed to have perhaps gone blind. It groped forward, no longer mocking anyone, but it must have memorized their last positions, or still been able to see the after-image, because it caught poor Phineas flat-footed, and the railroad man turned to flakes of rust himself, and fell in a formless pile to the floor. The others rushed up on the cruel rust-made man and attacked him. In the creature's blindness, it seemed less able to defend itself. Tomas raked a straight razor across the creature's throat, opening a wide gash so that it nodded like its head was going to flop off onto the floor. Milton picked up Phineas's prybar and smashed at it, and Molly wailed at it with her rake. Between them they opened a gash that ran from shoulder to hip, and the two halves of the rust-creature's torso drooped apart, though it remained standing. Finally Alexander lay into it with his machete, cutting off the creature's head so that it fell apart in flakes of rust just as Phineas had, and the two rust piles co-mingled on the ground.

Chaus re-entered the mine, collected a full sample jar of rust flakes, then went back to check if the dead pit-pony was still there. It remained, seemingly undisturbed since he'd first investigated it minutes ago. Chaus then took the jar outside to look at it in the sunlight, but for all its supernatural origin, the rust just looked ordinary when Chaus held the jar up to the sky.

The group followed the straight-ahead path next, entering a cave with a floor covered ankle-deep in sand. Continuing forward, they arrived in a perfectly square room with wood-paneled walls. On one wall was red graffiti saying "Abandon Hope" and a dead body lay slumped in the corner next to the writing. The body was bleached white as paper, and as they looked closer at it, seemed to be hollow. Molly tapped the body with her rake and it crumpled easily. Pressing harder, she flattened it; indeed there was nothing inside to support it. She used the teeth of her rake to tear off a sample, which Chaus gingerly removed and placed into a sample jar. Although it looked like paper, Chaus thought he recognized it as parchment, like the sheepskin of his old diploma.

They continued straight ahead and arrived in a larger cave with one straight, wood-paneled wall and two doors. Waiting inside the room was a small stone-skinned creature that looked like a gargoyle downspout like Tomas had seen in Chicago. The gargoyle bowed extravagantly to the group as they entered the room. In sweeping gestures and an exaggerated pantomime style, the little gargoyle indicated that it would love for them to go into the left-hand door. As a banker and a gambler, and thus both accomplished liars in their own right, Milton and Tomas felt certain that the little creature was lying to them somehow. Whatever master it served, it certainly didn't have their best interests at heart when it suggested they go to the left. The little creature pointed to its chest as if to say "me?" then shook its head "no, no!" and crossed its heart. Alexander ran up and threw open the right-hand door! ... aaand saw the entrance to a hallway going off to the side. Anticlimactic. The gargoyle looked halfway between smug and apologetic, "I tried to warn you" it seemed to shrug. But when the group started going through the door, it started gesticulating frantically, genuinely trying to stop them and warn them off! The group ignored the creature and walked down the hall.

They arrived in a room where the far wall was made entirely of pulsing liquid iron, pounding like there was a heart right behind it. They noticed that the effect of Chaus's spell was weaker here, so far from the door. Where the earlier iron wall had been almost too bright to look at, this one gave off a pleasant firelight glow as it cycled through the colors. Chaus theorized that there was, in fact, a heart behind the wall, and so carefully took off his academic regalia, folded it neatly and set it on the ground, rolled up his sleeves, and then took up a mining pick and began carving away at the wall with all his strength. He shaved off great curls and whorls of iron that fell solid to the ground. Somewhere in the distance, they heard the echo of a deep, thunderous voice, "What?! Who dares?!" Molly and Milton started at the sound and retreated to the hall to peer at Chaus from around the corner.

As the two watched, they heard a new sound, a kind of musical groaning and clanking, like something with accordions for legs and cymbals for feet going for a walk. A moment later, a new being entered the hall through the door the party had just used - it stood taller than human height but had no head, its body looked like a rubber-bulbed bicycle horn, and it had oversized hands and feet. As Molly and Milton watched with jaws dropped, the new creature started like it had just noticed them, scratched its head (or rather, where its head SHOULD be) in confusion, waggled a scolding finger at them, and then put its hands on its hips in a huff. Behind the new creature, they saw the little gargoyle peeking around the corner. As the monster's hand hit its hips, it squeezed its own rubber bulb, and with a great honking sound, fired dozens of whirling little circular blades. Both Molly and Milton were cut all over, and both knew instinctively that they couldn't survive another attack. They ran back into the main room, shouting a description of the new monster while cowering behind Tomas and Alexander for cover. Their backs against the pulsing iron wall, the group was trapped, with nowhere to run and no way to escape!

Groaning and clanking, the musical creature followed into the room, but before it could attack, Tomas pulled a gold coin from his pocket, invoked the mysterious entities he followed, known as the Arcana, and with an elaborate baseball windup, pitched the coin at the creature. Halfway along its flight, the coin winked out of existence in midair. The walking bicycle-horn scratched its head in confusion again, then elaborately shrugged. Chaus dropped the pick, drew his cavalry sabre, and charged the monster. He inflicted a critical wound that might have slain a lesser being in one strike, but the creature pounded its hands into its hips disapprovingly again, and more spinning blades flew out of the horn, along with a great musical honk. Chaus and Alexander both dodged and received only minor injuries, but Tomas took the full force of the blast, and like two of his friends, knew he could endure not a single more injury without dying. Alexander and Chaus charged the creature again, first scratching, and then actually puncturing its rubber bulb, but that only seemed to make it angry as it began gesturing wildly. Tomas pulled from his coat pocket a fossil he'd won in a rigged competition received as a gift from Sweet Nell. The fossil bloomed like a flower and became the skeleton of a dragon. The little dragon roared like an angry kitten, then spit a gout of green acid onto the creature. Its rubber bulb dissolved entirely away, and the rest of its bodyparts fell noisily to the floor. The gargoyle, who'd moved closer to watch from the end of the hall, looked absolutely shocked and turned to run away at full tilt.

Realizing how close they'd come to dying en masse, and fearing what might happen if they encountered any other dangers, the group agreed to return to the mine entrance. "I begin to see why so few who've entered this mine have returned back outside to tell about it," Chaus observed drolly. They filed down the hall and into the larger room where they'd met the little gargoyle, but there was no sign of the creature now. Both doors blew open and hot wind like from a furnace blew at them in great gusts from every direction. Molly, Milton, and Tomas all cringed, fearing that their doom had found them after all, but rather than grow hotter or scald them, the wind abruptly stopped.

They hurried the rest of the way back out of the mine and limped back into Irontown. While the others recuperated, Chaus located Phineas's widow, Mrs Cole, and gave her the jar of her husband's "ashes" (really the intermingled flakes of rust belonging to both Phineas AND the monster) and $10 worth of gold dust to help her cover her expenses. Though she was shocked by the news, and clearly in mourning, there was also a glimmer in widow's eye for this strange and mysterious scholar.


Gains
1 jar of rust flakes (given away)
1 jar of paper-skin

Losses
$1 spent on failed magic
$10 given away to Mrs Cole
Phineas Cole (turned to rust)

XP
1 Luck for Chaus Hussar for his donation in service of a Lawful cause
2 XP for surviving the fainting room
4 XP for the crumbling simulacrum (cruel rusted man)
1 XP for interacting with the deceased hungering husk (hollow paper man)
2 XP for negotiating with the gargoyle majordomo
4 XP for the sprayer machine (bicycle-horn being)
6 XP for exploring 6 new rooms
Total: 17 XP each for Chaus and Tomas, flat 10 XP each for Molly, Milton, and Alexander for surviving their first adventure

Sometimes when a Bob-omb and a bicycle-horn-duck love each other very much ...

Post-Mortem
If the two sessions late last year were kind of transitional, then I think we've officially arrived at a new chapter in the campaign. I let Peter just level up Chaus because I felt like I've been too stingy with my XP awards. I would have let Todd bring Sweet Nell up to level 3, but he seems to have retired her, so I let him create a new character at level 1. (I was also hoping someone would use the Knave class I wrote for David Coppeletti's eventually-to-be-published DCC Class Alphabet, and Todd graciously volunteered.) I also let him keep the fossil dragon Nell had just secured but never used. A fateful decision! We also welcomed a new player this week - Josh from the Bernie the Flumph! blog.

Between Todd McGowan, John Potts, and now Josh Burnett, this play group is shaping up to be something of an all-celebrity game, though perhaps with less stature than Todd's OTHER celebrity group with James Maliszewski and Dyson Logos.

For this session, I re-skinned "The Iron Coral" adventure from the Into the Odd rulebook. I've been wanting to run that since the first time I read it, and since Peter and Todd wanted to leave the Gold Soul Mines (at least temporarily, although they may decide to revisit it later) this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I spent a little while thinking about how to reimagine the original underwater, coral adventure site as a mine, but decided that the "soft red coral" that's growing out of control in the original would become living, liquid iron, and that the various human-built observation areas in the original would become squared-off, wood-paneled mining company rooms. I also decided on an explanation for what's going on here, although I'll wait until the group is through with this site before saying what that explanation is. With those ideas in mind, I was able to convert the room descriptions on the fly, without needing to prepare a detailed key of new locations.

The only place I messed up was in getting confused about which passageway out of that first room was filled with foam (which became gravel) although in my defense we were having our worst trouble getting the audio to work at that moment, so I was a little distracted. Fortunately Roll20's native audio worked much better than the last time I tried it, and the adventure could continue. Because of that mistake, the rooms they passed through were slightly less interesting than they could otherwise have been - and if they were avoiding the gravel, then different narration on my part might have led them into an entirely different part of the dungeon!

The monsters I spent a little time statting up for DCC, since DCC uses Hit Dice to determine a lot of things, and I2TO only gives hit points and ability scores for its monsters. I don't have any kind of rigorous system in place yet, but I estimated that monsters got about 1 HD per 5 hit points listed, with exceptional ability scores contributing to Armor Class and Saving Throws and the like. If I do more of this, I might try to formalize things a little more. For now, the informal approach seems to work fine.

In addition to writing up DCC stats, I felt like I ought to reimagine some/all of the monsters to change them from undersea horrors to underground mining monsters. The biggest change, probably, is the Sprayer Machine. Chris McDowall described the Sprayer Thing as a "huge toad-like thing" that "spits Itching Barbs." I thought a digging robot might be a good choice for a creature that spits blades at you. And then, I dunno, as soon as I thought that, the image of a walking bike horn cartoon character, complete with white gloves, just kind of popped into my head. The group seemed to enjoy him, and Josh pretty correctly identified him as being from Wackyland. The thing that's really interesting to me is that I don't think I ever would have come up with something like the Sprayer Machine all by myself. It came because I was reskinning McDowall's adventure. It's a reminder that every game using a published adventure is a kind of collaboration between the judge and the adventure's author, to say nothing of the collaboration between judge and players in EVERY adventure, published or not.

The fight with the Sprayer Machine was a thing of beauty. We came THIS close to a TPK ... and then Nell's fossil dragon won the night! Milton, Molly, and Tomas were all down to 1 hp, and Alexander wasn't doing at all well. Chaus MIGHT have survived one more attack, but it was absolutely down to the wire for the others. We'll see if they remain as lucky in the future! One surprise this week was how often I managed to roll wandering monsters. Usually, I feel like they rarely turn up, but this time around I got three encounters and one sign (the dead hungering husk.) Peter, Josh, and Todd were all pretty certain their characters were dead when I pointed out the dice indicating that last random encounter, but luckily for them, the table just said "A sudden rush of hot air." (They were also pretty certain the hot air was going to do 1 hp of damage to each of them. Can you imagine! That would have to be about the MOST ignoble way to die after surviving such a grueling fight.)

In light of my earlier concern about not passing out enough XP, I tried to give larger awards while saying within the DCC guidelines. My initial inclination was to award 1 each for the trapped room and the gargoyle, 2 for the rusted man, and 3 for the horn robot. But following inclinations like that is how I found myself wishing I'd been more generous. So I bumped them up to the amounts you see above. I considered, but decided against factorial experience for exploration (ie, 1 XP for the first room +2 XP for the second, +3 XP for the third, and so on.) Something like that (even something like that but multiplied by 10) might work in an XP for gold situation, where awards are routinely in the hundreds. But that would mean 21 XP for visiting 6 new rooms. Ultimately, I decided to go with a flat reward of 1 XP per room. I didn't feel right awarding twice as much for exploration as I did for everything else put together. It might be worth revisiting that discomfort some other time, but for now, I think the overall increase should help with my initial concern.