Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 2 Nov 2018

Characters
Archibald (innkeeper, 1st level Zombie)
played by American John

Nell (innkeeper, 2nd level Warrior)
played by Todd

Chaus Hussar (0th level cavalryman)
played by Peter

Detective Guillermo "the Bull" (man-at-arms)
NPC ally

Caspar, Melchior, and Abendego (magicians)
Salma and Penelope (acolytes)
NPC ... allies?
 
 
Session 7
The small pilgrimage arrived at the demon-shrine, an ancient pueblo building inside a large cave. The crowd of spectators stopped a few steps behind the adventurers, and whispered amongst themselves about the site before them. Confronted with the shrine, standing on the very doorstep of a human sacrifice, Archibald, Chaus Hussar, and Nell felt indecisive. Nell turned to the nearest Mason, Abendego, "Now, remind me again why we're doing' this sacrifice? What are we lookin' to accomplish?" Abendego explained that the architecture of the West is boring and undeveloped, Hezzemuth, as a queen of the ants, is sure to be a builder, certain to build great things, and that he and his colleagues want to be part of it. Melchior leaned over to chime in that the sisters had promised them that Hezzemuth would reward them with special demon's eyes.
 
Nell took all this in, then asked "Now, remind me again who these sisters are?" Melchior repeated the story of how they found the shrine while looking for interesting architecture in the Maw, and that in the shrine they met the two Mexican sisters who inducted them into Hezzemuth's cult. When the Illuminati sent an assassin from back east to kill them, the sisters somehow foresaw the assassin, and gave the Freemasons the advice they needed to get the drop on the assassin and capture him.
 
Nell, Archibald, and Chaus Hussar debated what to do. They settled on the idea that it would be like going to see a Vaudeville act at a music hall, and decided to go ahead and enjoy the show. Nell still felt conflicted, and called back to the crowd to explain that the Masons wouldn't be performing the sacrifice themselves, it would be the sisters ("The beautiful sisters!" chimed in Abendego) but this information did not deter the crowd.
 
The adventurers entered the shrine. They saw a giant pool of water, yellow with sulfur, and smelled brimstone in the air. They saw the giant soldier ant that'd killed Archibald, lurking at the far back of the room. The Masons led them past the pool through a doorway to the right, into a large hall with a high ceiling, held aloft by wooden pillars. At the front of the room was a stone altar with a man bound and gagged to the stone. He was flanked by two beautiful Mexican sisters and two stone sculptures of Hezzemuth, marble images that cast her as a Greek goddess holding tools like the plumb bob, the ruler, the triangle. The crowd filed in, and all eyes were on the bound man. They edged to the back of the room, trying to stay as far from the bloodshed as possible. ("Ohhh, you mean this is COLLEGE college!")
 
The Freemasons took their place at the front of the room, standing around the altar. The sisters, Salma and Penelope, addressed the crowd. "Ladies and gentlemen! Tonight, you will witness a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! The queen, Hezzemuth the Painmistress is coming to earth!" While the crowd was in awe of the sisters, Archibald, Nell, and Chaus Hussar whispered among themselves. They saw another door on the back right-hand side of the room. They crept over, sidling between the other onlookers, and pulled the door open just far enough to slip through. Chaus Hussar went ahead while Archibald and Nell stayed to guard the door.
 
Suddenly, chaos erupted in a matter of moments. One member of the crowd came forward and threw back the hood cloaking his face - it was Detective Guillermo "the bull"! "Tonight?" he yelled, "Tonight you sons of bitches are going to pay for your crimes!" He fired his handgun at the sisters, but only hit the wall behind them. In the other room, Chaus Hussar entered a dusty, disused space with another stone altar and another pair of statues, these showing Hezzemuth as a cruel smiling woman with razor teeth, licking blood from a dagger, and holding a whip, a flail, and a sword. As he stepped forward to investigate, he heard the noise from the hall ... and stepped into a bear trap. Nell heard Chaus Hussar scream in pain and ran through the door to help, shouting "Save Guillermo!" over her shoulder to Archibald. The Freemasons rushed forward to detain the detective, and Caspar stabbed him in the shoulder. Archibald lurched forward, but his new zombie body was too slow. Salma made beckoning motions with her hands, and said in a powerful voice "Come now detective, you don't want to hurt us." Guillermo stopped struggling against the Masons, his arms went limp, his eyes went blank. In a voice like talking in his sleep he said "I will come to you now. I don't want to hurt you." He walked to the front of the room with Archibald too slow behind him, and Penelope slit the detective's throat before plunging her knife into the bound man's chest.
 
There was a thunderclap and blinding flame as a demon tore through the wall of reality and into the room. The crowd panicked and tried to rush for the exit, shoving and jostling in a frightened herd, as Archibald backpedaled for the door his friends had disappeared into. Hezzemuth laughed and laughed, lashing out into the crowd again and again with her whip. Each time it cracked another onlooker was torn apart, their bodies practically exploding under the force of the demon queen's wrath. The last thing Archibald saw as he backed through the door was the Freemasons' eyes suddenly glowing with the light of hellfire. "My eyes!" they shouted, "I can truly see!"
 
In the dusty room, it took Nell and Chaus Hussar several tries to free his leg from the bear trap. They froze when they heard the commotion in the other room, and Nell drew a bead on the door as Archibald came through. She wiped her brow and holstered her pistol. "Mr Archibald!" she scolded, "I nearly shot you!" They could hear Hezzemuth's whip cracking and her horrible laughter as the remaining members of the crowd screamed in fear and agony. After getting free and wrapping a bandage around his leg, Chaus Hussar put the bear trap in his bag and moved to get a closer look at the altar and its horrid statues. Archibald noticed that the real Hezzemuth looked much more similar to these gruesome visages than she did to the neo-classical statues in the main hall.
 
Chaus Hussar tried to topple one of the statues, hoping it might somehow break Hezzemuth's power, but he had to rock it on its base to make it move, and it fell forward on him instead, pinning him to the floor. At the same time, the other statue came to life and moved toward the trapped man. Archibald touched his demon ore necklace, the one that bound his soul to his dead body, and projected his own ghost temporarily into the room. Archibald's un-dead flesh was grey, his posture poor, his movements slow and jerky - but the ghost that appeared was like an idealized version of him as he'd been in life, and his flesh fell to the floor like a discarded cloak as the ghost emerged. He tangled with the statue, distracted and passing through it as Nell worked to free Chaus Hussar. As soon as she got him out, the both set the statue back upright, and the one Archibald was fighting abruptly reverted to perfect stillness.
 
The sounds from the other room had quieted, so the three decided to make a break for it. When they re-entered the hall, they saw the soldier ant blocking the far door and a few survivors cowering against the back wall amidst a charnelscape of severed limbs and spilled blood. Archibald picked up a severed arm. The demon Hezzemuth stared at Nell. "Wouldst thou join me, Sweet Nell?" the demon's voice boomed, "Wouldst thou become my disciple?" Archibald threw the arm over the ant's head into the other room, and the great beast turned to follow the snack. Nell turned to the survivors "Get on now! This here's your chance!" They heard a splash as the ant charged into the sulfurous pool. The friends and the few survivors ran for the door, and found the entry room completely empty with no sign of the giant ant. They felt confused, but didn't stop to investigate the source of their good fortune, but rushed onward, back through the Maw, back to the elevator to the Gallows. "You know," said Archibald, "I'm getting tired of giant ants." The others nodded in agreement as they trudged.
 
It was evening as the group finally made their way to the surface. A few others must have escaped ahead of them, because everyone in town, from the elevator operator onward, seemed to be aware of what had transpired. The bartender at the Gallows offered the a round of stiff drinks. "Shoulda known that you all was the real heroes in this town," she said, commiserating with Nell. "Them Freemasons musta bamboozled us all somehow. I guess them preachers was right about that demon, tryin'a talk some sense into us." Archibald contemplated his drink. "Yes, and to think, it only took dozens of deaths to realize human sacrifice is wrong."
 
After their drinks, Chaus Hussar suggested going to rob the Freemason's hotel room, and Archibald and Nell agreed. The hotel manager said "Of course, I could never watch someone rob my customers, no matter how odious they are," then unlocked the room door and walked away. They found some spare clothes, and most importantly, the three Masons' spellbooks. One book contained a spell to save a person from falling, another a spell to help read other magical writing, and the third spell to inscribe magical runes. Chaus Hussar decided to try to learn magic, and wanted to keep two of the books. The group agreed that they could probably trade the final book to Pemberton Nimby in exchange for something made from the fossil they'd brought him. Nell mentioned she might like to get out of town for awhile, maybe stay away from the Maw and look for adventure somewhere else. She remembered a fairy tale she'd heard as a girl, the story of the Gold Soul Mine where one day all the miners vanished and all the townspeople left, and only their ghosts still worked the mines...
 
 
Gains
demon eyesight x3 (effects TBD)
stolen spellbooks x3 (Feather Fall, Read Magic, Runic Alphabet - Mortal)
 
Losses
Guillermo "the Bull" (sacrificed to demon)
unnamed sacrificial human (sacrificed to demon)
about 15 spectators from the Gallows (sacrificed BY demon)
 
XP
4 XP for participating in sacrifice/summoning
1 XP for bear trap
1 XP for living statues
1 XP for giant soldier ant
1 XP for robbing Freemasons
Total: 9 XP for Archibald and Nell, flat 5 XP for Chaus Hussar for finishing funnel
 
Running graveyard (and session of death)
Detective Guillermo "the Bull" the NPC Mexican police-captain (7), Bjornk the hunter (6), 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)
 
 
Postmortem
My main goal going into this session was to preserve my players' ability to decide how they would interact with the human sacrifice / demon summoning scenario. I was willing to let them be spectators, participants, or opponents, but I didn't want to force them into any of those roles. By that measure, I felt like this session was a success. I think a couple of my players felt bad afterward for having take a little while to decide what they wanted their characters to do, but from my perspective, the important thing was that they weren't forced (or rushed) into doing anything they didn't want. And as I said, deciding they just wanted to watch the sacrifice and summoning was, from my perspective, a completely valid decision for them to make. 
   
I can recall a couple times as a player, including once when John was the ref, where what I really wanted to do was watch one monster fight another monster so I didn't have to fight either of them - and in retrospect, I can see that the judges were doing the same things I did here, kind of slow-rolling it and checking in often to make sure the players were still on-board with a spectator role in the scene. In fact, the one thing I wish I'd handled differently was the combat between Guillermo and the sisters (who, yes, were Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz). Again, I made decisions about what each of the NPCs was going to do, then had my players roll the dice. This was slower than me rolling the dice myself, but it didn't really constitute meaningful participation in the combat, I don't think. In retrospect, I wish I'd rolled for myself so I could have narrated a little faster, or assigned each player a faction (sisters, masons, and Guillermo) and let them control them fully. (Also, man!, that whole thing could have played out differently if Guillermo had hit someone during the surprise round, or not ended up last in the initiative order, or succeeded his saving throw against being charmed.)
   
This session felt like the end of one chapter and the start of something new for the campaign. I think my players want to branch out. The goal of the megadungeon mine is to be the default campaign activity. If you can't think of what to do, you go down into the mine, and you find something that sends you on a quest. Then you complete the quest, and unless that turned up new leads, go back into the mine for something else. In the original BPBM campaign where I was a player, finding demon ore often served as the reason for a quest, because we had to find someone who could turn it into a magic item, and then do them a favor. The other way we got embroiled in a quest was finding a letter from a hostage, which eventually led to us mounting a rescue. I think my players liked going on the quest for Nimby, and want more of that sandbox style play. And I think they want to see more of the world. This has got me thinking about the limits of a procedurally generated dungeon, how large it can be, and how much variety it needs to stay interesting. The next place they're off to is Goodberry Monthly's "Goldsoul Mine" dungeon.
   
I liked Peter's idea to go rob the Freemason's hotel room. We rolled randomly for the spells there at the table. At the end of the night, Peter also rolled to find his wizard spells, and got Color Spray, Sleep, and Spider Climb, the lucky devil. Each time my players have found a magical item, I've had to decide what it does. When they trade the spellbook to get back the fossils, I've decided that they're going to turn into a dragon!

Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 12 Oct 2018

Characters
Archibald (innkeeper, 1st level Zombie)
played by American John
  
Nell (innkeeper, 2nd level Warrior)
played by Todd
  
Bjornk (0th level hunter)
Chaus Hussar (0th level cavalryman)
played by Peter
  
Balthazar, Melchior, & Abendego (magicians)
NPC allies
  
  
Session 6
The townsfolk of Brimstone spent the week spreading the word about the impending demon sacrifice. The whole town was a titter with anticipation. "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!" The priests and preachers of every church in Brimstone held extra services denouncing the sacrifice and exhorting their followers not to participate, but by Sunday morning, the Gallows was packed and the excited crowd spilled into the street, sipping beer and milling as they waited. At last, it was time. "LLLet's get ready to rumbleee!!!"
  
The crowd parted as the two adventuring parties promenaded into the Gallows bar. Onlookers clapped, they stomped their feet, they whistled, hooted, and cheered. The three Freemasons, Balthazar, Melchior, and Abendego led the way. Archibald and Sweet Nell followed close behind, basking in their momentary glory. "Now alright, finally we're gettin' the respect we deserve," Nell whispered to Archibald. The five ordered a round of drinks, and round-trip lift tickets. The bartender offered to comp them, but they insisted on this show of humility.
  
Out of the crowd, a hunter, Bjornk stepped forward. He'd come south from the pine barrens. He believed himself to be cursed, and thought that only tasting demon meat could save him. He approached Archibald and offered to purchase Ally, the alligator that had improbably ended up in Archibald's care. Archibald considered. "Yes," said the dead man, "Ally belongs with the living." Some time during the night, the sleepless, deathless Archibald had stolen back the darkstone necklace from Nell and regained control over his own unhallowed soul, his own undying body. He gave Bjornk Ally and bought him a drink. "I like you," said Archibald, "you stay close now."
  
Into the elevator the adventurers strode. They rode down into the depths alone, but they didn't remain alone long. The elevator worked tirelessly carrying more and more groups down from the bar. Each small crowd hustled to catch up to those ahead of them, until 30 or 40 onlookers were following in the adventurers' wake.
  
The group processed through the towering natural tunnels, arriving during their first hour at the waterfall where two streams joined to birth a larger underground river. Over the roar of the water, they heard clicking, and soon three giant insects were upon them, a giant ant, a giant centipede, and a cave cricket. The three masons cast baleful spells that looked like streams of black math being written across the air. Abendego wounded the cricket and Archibald rushed it, but it left over him. Nell shot at it but it leapt out of the way again, and her bullet nearly grazed Archibald. "Hey!" The masons cast their mathemagics again, and the centipede was cut in twain by long division, the cricket lost its legs and its life to subtraction. Bjornk sensed his moment of destiny and stepped forward, grasping Ally by the tale and slapping the ant in the face with the alligator. The ant shook off the blow and bit into Bjornk's stomach, tearing out his guts. The cursed hunter died in agony as the giant insect tore off one of his legs before gorging itself on his thigh. Nell shot the ant as it ate, then considered Bjornk's mutilated remains. "Well, no sense in lettin' him go to waste," she said as she broke his skull open with the enchanted, bloodthirsty dagger she'd taken from poor Merriwether. "Now Mister Archibald, I want no hard feelin's between us. You go on and eat now, I don't want you gettin' cranky with my later." Archibald knelt down beside Bjornk. "I like brains," he said and began tearing out handfuls to devour.
  
The crowd had been on tenterhooks throughout the fight, had gasped and murmured when Bjornk went down and was feasted on by insects, but the sight of Archibald eating Bjork's brain proved too much for them. (This is the NPC equivalent of the classic freshman discovery "Ohhh, you mean this is COLLEGE college!") Probably half the crowd left, their morale gone, backing away and rushing back to the elevator shaft. While Archibald ate, Nell searched Bjornk's body and took his compass, and Archibald retrieved the hunter's rifle, and wrapped his own alligator Ally around his neck like a stole as he stood up.
  
The cavalryman Chaus Hussar stepped forward from the crowd to walk closer to the adventurers. Far from being frightened, he felt invigorated. Melchior turned to Nell as they walked, "Cracking shot, that. You made short work of the bugger! This is exciting, isn't it? The two greatest teams of adventurers in Brimstone working together?" Nell thought of her first missed shot and Bjornk's death. "Now, for this human sacrifice, do we need to bring the human, or...?" Melchior looked over his shoulder back at the crowd. "Oh not to worry, we have the blighter already tied up at the shrine. Nasty chap. The Illuminati back east sent an assassin to do us in, nasty brutes! Lucky for us the sisters let us know he was coming. We got the drop on him, and ... well, now he's going to help us out summoning our demon."
  
Unfortunately, their conversation was interrupted their by the arrival of more giant insects. Curiously, it was another trio of ant, centipede, and cricket. Nell fired on the centipede, and her lucky shot exploded the venom sack inside the beast's mouth. The masons again called on their mathemagics to assail the insects. Melchior divided the wounded centipede into fractions, killing it. Balthazar pierced the ant with acute angles, and Chaus Hussar beheaded it with his cavalry sabre. The cricket leapt at Nell and bit her hat right off her head. Archibald fired at the cricket using Bjornk's rifle, and missed the insect, but put a hole in Nell's hat, just missing the top of her head. Nell slew the cricket, retrieved her hat, and went over to Archibald to scold him. "Now Mister Archibald, I told you I was sorry about earlier, you don't have to try to take my head off!" Archibald chuckled to himself, "Hehehe, sorry not-sorry."
  
With the crowd following behind, the group continued on their path. Chaus carried the giant ant's severed head by one antennae and offered it to Archibald as a way to gain entree with the in-crowd. Archibald accepted the head and began breaking it open, "I like brains." The continued through a section of mining tunnels, past the recently-abandoned YJMC mine. The Yellow Jacket miners trapped inside would have to wait for another day for rescue.
  
The mining tunnels widened out to become like subway tunnels. The group passed a pool of muddy, brackish water. Nell found the skeleton of a long-dead mule, with a single stick of old dynamite in its saddle bag. Archibald warned the crowd, "Don't drink! Poison water!"
  
The mining tunnels gave way to tile-lined corridors, and after another half hour of walking they saw it - the demon shrine to Hezzemuth...
  
  
Gains
1 stick of dynamite
  
Losses
Bjornk (devoured by ant)
 
XP
2 XP for negotiating with Freemasons
2 XP for fist multi-insect encounter
2 XP for second multi-insect encounter
Total: 6 XP for Archibald and Nell, flat 5 XP for Chaus Hussar for starting funnel
  
Running graveyard (and session of death)
Bjornk the hunter (6), 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
I don't usually end my sessions on cliffhangers (in fact, one of my goals with both this campaign and my Barrowmaze / In the Shadow of Mount Rotten campaign has been to run self-contained sessions to accommodate slightly different groups of players each time) but there wasn't time to do more.
   
In a way, this session was like my worst-case scenario for an online game. The players set a goal for themselves, and I led them through two combats and four rooms, and basically, got them as far as the starting point of the adventure they wanted to go on. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't rolled for random encounters on the way to the shrine. The fact that both encounters were with identical monster sets, and that they used of most of our playing time, made it worse. 
   
Alternatively, if I did allow for random encounters, I wish I'd made it more interactive, so that the players didn't spend so much time watching MY magicians fight MY monsters. I had each player make the attack rolls for one of the Freemasons, but I wish I'd given each of them one Mason to control completely, so that they could have been more involved in the fights.
   
Why didn't we have much time? Most of my game sessions these days last about 2 hours. I want those 2 hours to be interesting and eventful. I've played in too many online game with other referees that were basically the nightmare scenario, one room, one combat, and ultimately one session because it was so boring that no one involved can quite work up the interest to play a second one. Usually, I've felt like it's gone pretty well. This week the time was a little tighter because we got a late start, and because we were introducing a new player into the group. I know Peter because he and I were fellow players in The Grand Tapestry's Urutsk campaign, but I don't think my other players had met him before. The social part of the session went well - so well, in fact, that I'm trying not to be too hard on myself that the game part felt short. But I don't want all my sessions to go like this, so it's important to use this post-mortem to understand what happened, and why, and how to avoid it in the future. If I had basically started the characters at the entrance to the shrine, then there wouldn't have been a cliffhanger, and the events of next session would have taken place this time. And if what had needed two sessions had taken place in one, then we could have gone on to something new and different a session sooner.
   
Why didn't I just handwave the travel, why did I roll for encounters along the way? I don't know exactly. It's hard to put into words, but I felt like I was following a particular ethos of D&D play. The danger of the dungeon doesn't care that you're on a mission. You can't just teleport to the adventure site, you have to get there, and you have to get back. The journey can be just as dangerous as the destination. But if what that ethos gets me is spending a 2 hour session and having to quit just when my players get to the start of the adventure they wanted to have - if that's what it gets me, then I need to rethink what I'm doing and how I want to accomplish it. First of all, I handwave overland travel all the time, I suspect everyone does. Unless you're hexcrawling, there's no reason to play out every step of the journey. Second, there's a middle ground between Star Trek transporter travel and re-enacting Zeno's Paradox in the hallways. Even hexcrawling, even dungeoncrawling through a "cleared" area of a megadungeon, you can give brief narration to locate the characters within the fictional space, and truly make it brief so that you can get on with things. I should have done that, I think.
   
The Dreams in the Lich House campaign event generator gave us "dire omens" this session. It fit well with the ongoing events to have the town preachers trying to warn everyone that this is a bad idea. It amuses me to imagine that the adventuring companies have something like the status of rock bands and the whole town is gaga over them. Having the town's moral authority figures railing impotently against the adventurers' bad influence just drives it home even more. I'm impressed by how well using it has worked out. It might be good to have something a little more tailored to my specific campaign ... but on the other hand, the entries here are open-ended enough to work pretty well far from their original setting.
   
I wasn't originally planning to have the crowd follow the player characters in. I guess I thought they were just going to stay up in the bar and wait to hear back. But one of my players asked if they were coming, and you know, it seemed obvious that they should. Having a crowd of on-sight spectators was interesting, and it was funny to roll morale after the giant ant ate Bjornk's lower body and Archibald started in on his brain. Allowing the crowd to play the "straight man" to my players' slapstick horror antics highlights what's humorous about their characters' behavior - and the irony of the crowd going from innocently naively cheering for a human sacrifice to them being confronted with the reality of the grisliness of their demand got several laughs at the table.
   
From my players' perspective, I don't think this was a bad session. As I said, we successfully introduced a new regular player into a long-term group, and they enjoyed the role-playing aspects of the session. I just hope to (usually) do more when I run sessions in the future.

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.

Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 19 Aug 2018

Characters
Meriwether the infantryman (1st level Cleric)
played by American John

Nell the innkeeper (1st level Warrior)
played by Todd

Pemberton Nimby (sage)
NPC ally


Session 4
The townspeople of Brimstone had finally recovered from their collective hangovers (brought on by a bit too much neighborly affection from the Canadian fur trappers) ... but unfortunately, one of the supply trains was infested, and it brought a whole passel of mice into town. Their brown furry bodies skittering over the dirt roads made it look like the whole ground was crawling with horrible life. Brimstone had booze again - but that was about all they had, as the dadgum little varmints ate up pretty much everything but the whiskey. The situation didn't bother Meriwether and Nell much though, as they didn't plan on spending much time in town.

Nell and Meriwether had previously agreed on a plan to try to bring Archibald back to life. Nell swore she would have her revenge on Archibald for how cruelly he had treated her in the past, and while Meriwether had no memory of Archibald being cruel to anyone, he did want to see his friend again, and he had a peculiar itch to learn more about this whole resurrection business. Meriwether had adopted the bat statue he found down the Maw whole-heartedly, and he'd given himself up to the worship of Camazotz the bat god. He might not know much more about the demon bat than the critter's name, but he was fixing to start him a cult if he could just persuade some people in town to join him. And beside's Nell could be awfully persuasive. "Oh he was so terrible cruel to me!" wailed Nell, "And you what? Yes, come to think of it, that hustler owed me money, too! Oh, I'mma make him pay something good!" Again, Meriwether didn't really think any of that was true, but who could say no to Sweet Nell?

Fortunately for their plan, Nell's former occupation as an innkeeper meant that she knew a rumor about a disgraced doctor who'd been run out of town after people caught him paying vagrants to dig up graves so he could study the bodies. Rumor was the sonbitch hadn't even gone far, just moved out to the tent city just past the northwest corner of town. They took the long way round, sticking to the outskirts, passing through the cemetery to retrieve Archibald's body before making their way over to the tent camp. They found the resurrectionist's abode, an old Civil War hospital tent that received a wide berth from its neighbors. And inside, they found the resurrectionist himself, Pemberton Nimby.

This guy, basically. (And yes, I did a Peter Lorre impression for his voice.)

 
Nell and Meriwether showed Dr Nimby Archibald's ant-bitten body, and the nugget of demon ore they hoped he could use to resurrect him. Nimby assured them that he could bring Archibald back, and that he could be less of a free-willed individual and more of a puppet. (Nell was adamant about this point.) He explained that he would fashion the ore into an artificial heart, and whoever held the heart would command Archibald's body. On the issue of payment, Nimby didn't want money. ("Are you sure?" asks Nell, "because Archibald is good for it. He'd be happy to repay you just as soon as he's done reimbursing me!") He wanted them to either bring him more demon ore, or convince the mayor to let him come back into town. Despite Nell's golden tongue, they preferred to fetch the ore, although Meriwether felt nervous about going back down the Maw after what happened to his friend. Fortunately, Nimby has a lead on some demon ore. There's an older mine where the final discovery was some demon ore, but unfortunately, the miners released something from deeper underground and all of them were killed. The company closed down the mine and hushed the whole thing up. (How does he know what the miners found before they died, if none of them survived to tell the tale? Better not to ask.) He'll use their ore to resurrect Archibald, on the condition that they pay him two nuggets of demon ore in return. They all agreed, and Nell spat into her hand to shake on it, baffling Meriwether, who, for all his interest in the occult and macabre, remained startlingly naive.
 
Nell and Meriwether rode out to the site of the mine. They tied their horses up to the last intact hitching post, next to a shattered water trough. They easily broke away the makeshift carpentry where the entrance had been halfheartedly boarded up. The sign announcing the mine's name had been splashed with whitewash, then broken in half. Lighting a lantern, they entered the mine, and immediately saw a main shaft straight ahead of them, and a secondary shaft opening off to one side. Meriwether observed that the miners likely wouldn't have gone to the trouble of digging a second shaft if the first one still had any ore in it, but Nell ignored him, and they started down the main mining tunnel.

Nell led them into the first "room" (really a side-tunnel, but as Meriwether would later observe, the whole mine and cavern complex really was laid out like a building, even in the natural, water-carved regions). As they entered, they heard creaks and groans of rock and timber, and the doorway collapsed trapping them in the room. Inspecting the rubble, Nell decided the hours of digging it would take to escape was too much work, so they searched among the wood scraps littering the floor until the found a trap door and a ladder leading downward. Nell climbed down first, and saw a natural cave filled with stalactites growing up out of the floor like a sapling nursery.

Squinting, she thought she saw a patch of darker darkness at the far end that likely represented another way out of the cave. As she strained her eyes, a rock whizzed past her head and shattered against the cave wall behind her, showering her with fragments and dust. Meriwether, who was halfway down the ladder, dropped the rest of the way to the ground and fired in the direction the rock came from, exploding a stalactite. Nell realized that one of the stalactites had moved, just not the one Meriwether shot, and opened fire as well, her bullet passing through the stalactite as though it were made of water. The stalactite's surface rippled and seemed almost to boil, and lashed out like a tentacle, grabbing another stone from the floor to pitch at Nell's head, grazing her temple and sending her to her knees. Meriwether dropped his rifle and ran forward, drawing the weird tooth-shaped dagger the group had discovered down in the Maw. For the barest instant he hesitated before striking - a voice of protest spoke in his head "It does not live. It will not bleed." - but Meriwether's determination to protect his friend prevailed, the dagger struck true, and the stalactite turned to dust and fell away like a crumbling sandcastle.

The two paused to bandage Sweet Nell's head and check the lantern, then collected a sample of the dust and made their way through the crowded cave to enter a natural tunnel. In one direction, they saw the tunnel continue on with other caves branching off it. In the other, they saw a twisting slope where it looked like they'd be able to clamber back up to the top level. They hurried up one at a time, with Meriwether holding the lantern, then passing it up to Nell before beginning his own clamber. They found themselves in a mine shaft that the believed was the main passage they'd been in before. The peeked into the first room they encountered without entering it, and saw a sagging ceiling barely being held aloft by a few makeshift support beams. They passed it by and looked through the door to the next room, where they locked eyes with a pair of bizarre amphibians with long noses who appeared to be "fishing" down a hole in the floor.

Nell produced some dried beef she had once taken from Harry the butcher's dead body. Meriwether took the beef into the cave, and broke off flakes to offer the two creatures. They rolled up their snouts like reeling in a line, then approached Meriwether to accept the food. By carefully flaking off chunks of dried meat while walking slowly backward, Meriwether was able to lead the amphibians to the mouth of the collapsing room. He tossed the rest of the beef inside, and when they followed, shot and broke one of the beams, causing the entire ceiling to collapse, either killing (or at least trapping) the two creatures.
 

I totally forgot that cave fishers are supposed to be crustaceans, so this what I described instead.

 
Using a grappling hook and rope that Meriwether had graverobbed borrowed from Archibald, the pair descended down the hole the weird lizards had been using to "fish". As Meriwether set foot on the cave floor below, the whole ground seemed to ripple like the surface of a pond. Meriwether realized it was another stone-mimicking monster, and began preparing a spell to paralyze it. A tentacle that moved like liquid but looked like solid stone emerged from the floor and battered Meriwether. This time it was Nell who dropped in to help, cutting the tentacle in half with a well-placed shot. The severed half of the tentacle turned to gravel, then melted back into the surface as each pebble landed. The floor seemed to boil like an overheated stew. Over the protests of his dagger - a tooth, he realized, from the mouth of the great Death Bat itself - Meriwether stabbed the magically-charged dagger. The ground froze in place as the creature was paralyzed, then crumbled to gravel as it died. The pair collected a second sample alien matter from the stony remains.

The cave they found themselves in was like a tunnel in its own right, albeit a very narrow, tightly curving one. The followed the winding path downward until they reached a point where a waterfall was pouring into the room from above. Opposite the waterfall was an exit, which led out into a much wider cave tunnel with other side-caverns opening off of it. They entered one of these, where they saw a pair of large, drowsy lizard creatures lounging alongside a pool of water. They managed to back out carefully, and chose another side-cave. Here they saw well-preserved fossil bodies of two ancient lizards encased in the wall. Working together, Meriwether and Nell dug out the fossils, then climbed and clambered their way back to the surface, and rode back to town.

Back at the tent camp, Nimby had laid out Archibald's body on an operating table, and appeared to be doing ... well something to it. He was well pleased to see the fossils. He refused to take them as payment in lieu of demon ore, but told them that if they left the fossils with him, he would perform another favor for them in the future. After some quick deliberation, Meriwether and Sweet Nell agreed. Nimby promised that the next time they came to see them, Archibald would be read to rejoin them in the mine, to help retrieve the precious demon ore to pay the group's debt to the disturbing resurrectionist.
 
 
Gains
2 fossilized lizards
1 resurrection of Archibald

Losses
None (for a change!)

XP
2 XP for negotiating with Pemberton Nimby
1 XP for first stone mimic
1 XP for cave fishers
1 XP for second stone mimic
1 XP for snapping salamanders
2 XP for fossils
8 XP for exploring 8 new rooms
Total: 16 XP each

Running graveyard (and session of death)
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
This week, Dreams in the Lich House's random campaign event table gave us vermin. This didn't come up much since the group decided to head out of town to rob an abandoned freestanding mine instead of going back down into the Maw. I think my players are feeling understandably wary about the dangers of the first level of this place. Giant centipedes, cave crickets, and giant soldier ants all have 3 HD, and two of the three have attacks that can kill a 0th or 1st level character outright. The only 1 HD monster they're likely to encounter is the giant worker ant, and even those have a high AC that makes them challenging for low-level combatants to defeat. I do really like the campaign event generator though. It definitely helps me, at least, feel like the campaign world is a living place. Recently I've been trying to think of ways you could use something like this to breathe some life into domain-level factions ... although I wouldn't want the random events to become so important that they overwhelmed any attempt by the players to form their own agenda and set their own goals. That wouldn't be railroading, exactly, since it would be random rather than scripted, but events that forced my players to be re-active instead of active would still rob the game of something important.

I created Pemberton Nimby because of my players' goals, specifically the goal to bring back Archibald. The fact that it was Todd who wanted to resurrect John's character to use as an undead servant is fine within the social dynamics of my group - although in general I would want to be very careful about allowing one player to take over another player's character. If the friendship dynamics were different, I wouldn't have let it go quite this way. One thing I am okay with is letting characters come back from the dead as a new character class - once. If Archibald dies again after this, that'll be the end of him. I actually quite like, though, the idea of character classes that you can only take on if you've died. Metal vs Skin suggests that the only way to play a shapeshifting hengeyokai is to come back from the dead as one, and of course Terra Frank wrote three wonderful undead character classes for the first Gongfarmer's Almanac in 2015. (Her contributions are in the first issue, if you go for the free pdfs instead of the at-cost print copy.) 

The mine itself was procedurally generated using Melancholies & Mirths' abandoned mine generator. Lungfungus' generator creates a mine above a larger cavern complex, with more dangers in the untamed caves below. The monsters are all his recommendations as well. At first they were all randomly generated, but at a certain point, I capped the list so that wandering monsters would come from a reduced subset of his original bestiary for the place. This generator did not produce a large number of monsters or treasures - although I think it did produce enough of both to make the outing worthwhile - but what it did generate in quantity were "trick" caves.

Lungfungus also doesn't say anything about it one way or another, but I used his baseline "tricks" to create more interconnections between the rooms and levels. So the room where the entryway collapses, for example, doesn't force you to dig out the entrance - it also provides you with a second exit to the level below. Water features also connect upward and downward, linking rooms that would have been separate if I hadn't decided they must be linked and then connected them. The one thing I worry about is that a dungeon (even if it's supposed to be an abandoned mine) with so many empty rooms could get a little boring. Even if the empty rooms are enlived slightly by tricks and interconnections, there's not really a lot there for the players to do or interact with.

This whole campaign is something of an experiment, with me using other people's random generators to procedurally generate a megadungeon, minidungeons hidden inside the main space, even campaign events. At some point, I'm going to get tired of this, and use what I've learned to write more of my own material. I haven't reached that point yet, but I can see it, off on the horizon somewhere, and I know that it's coming. This isn't because there's anything wrong with the generators I'm using. On the contrary, a big part of my desire to make things of my own is because of how much they've inspired me. Another part is simply that they are someone else's, made for their goals, for their campaign, and thus they don't necessarily fit my goals quite as well. Everything implies setting, and I find myself wanting a slightly different setting, with my own materials to imply it.

Links to Play Reports

Not that long ago, Papers & Pencils posted an introduction to a new batch of "actual play" or "play report" posts, and it got me thinking about all the excellent play reports I've read in the OSR blogosphere over the years.

In my efforts to collect the links below, I've also come up with a couple recommendations about writing play reports.

First, it really helps if you tag/label your posts.

Ideally, tag your posts both with whichever "actual play" synonym you're using, as well as a second tag with the name of the campaign. Sometimes it's nice to see all of someone's play reports together, and sometimes it's nice to see the play reports for one campaign interwoven with posts laying out setting materials for it. Without tagging, it's very difficult for anyone to find your old reports. At best, they can try to expand all the month and year folders in your archive, and look for post titles that sound like they might be actual play. The gold standard, if you feel up to it, seems to be to create a static page of links to all the reports in a single campaign, so that people can easily read them in order.

On my own blog, the games where I'm the referee are tagged as session reports, and the games I play in are tagged as play reports.

Second, narratives are easier to read than transcripts. If you want to quote yourself or your players directly, be warned that a little goes a long way, and a lot is probably too much.

Third, practice every good writing skill you know. Some of these reports I like much more than others. Another time I might try to understand what separates my favorites from the ones I like least. For now, let's say that it's probably best to go with a conversational style. Some people can write within-fiction accounts well, either fictional news report from within the campaign world or fictional first-person narratives allegedly written by player characters - but it's my impression that those are more difficult to do well than talking through it in plain language. Frequent paragraph breaks are your friend; a wall of text is not. The right amount of detail is a balancing act, but it's probably better to highlight a few amusing anecdotes and summarize things that happened in a straightforward fashion. Personally, I also enjoy hearing from other referees how they made certain decisions and rulings as a kind of post-mortem, but the absence of that analysis also won't doom you.


Jeff's Gameblog
Probably the first "actual play" reports I ever read were written by Jeff Reints. As far as I know, the first campaign he blogged about was his Cinder campaign. A few years ago, he probably would have been most famous for his Wessex campaign, also known as "The Caves of Myrrdin". More recently, you might have heard of his Vaults of Vyzor campaign. I really love the fake old first-person dungeon crawler CRPG graphics he put together for his Vyzor posts. You can see an example below. (Jeff's players also create a lot of maps and art, and he posts a lot of it in the session reports. It livens them up even more.) Jeff doesn't tag his play reports separately, but he does tag them with the names of his campaigns, so you'll see the reports alongside all the things he creates for them. It was much shorter lived, but he also ran a few sessions of Doom of the Jaredites, a hexcrawl based on the Mormon myths about the lost tribes of Israel settling in the American southwest.
   

   
Roles, Rules, & Rolls
Roger ran at least two campaigns that I'm aware of. One was to send players into the Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon. The other was his Trossley campaign. Roger tags the campaigns, but not the play reports. Over the course of those two campaigns, he wrote his own Cellar of the Castle Ruins dungeon level, that I believe fits directly above the CotMA. Frankly, it's worth checking out everything in his "Rules and Tools" sidebar. You can see a map of the Cellar below.
   

 
Telecanter's Receding Rules
Telecanter didn't start out tagging any of his posts. If you browse his archive, you can find a number of early play reports by looking for entries that have the same name, followed by a Roman numeral, for example in September 2009, he has a series of posts about a game he called Epithalamium. Later, he started tagging his play reports as either post-session narratives or post-mortems. These overlap a lot, and most reports are tagged with both, but there are a few you'll only see by looking at one or the other. Like Roger, a lot of Telecanter's games featured a dungeon of his own making, the Coastal Caves, which is in the one-page dungeon format. You can see an image of the map below. Telecanter wrote a lot of really interesting free content, and I highly recommend checking out the links along the top of his blog, all of the really, but perhaps especially the DM Aids.
 

 
Dreams in the Lich House
John's blog is pretty much just setting creation and play reports, and the settings he creates for his campaigns are all pretty memorable and interesting. He doesn't tag play reports separately, so you'll find them interspersed among his campaign materials. His Gothic Greyhawk campaign is the oldest one I'm aware of him writing about. I started reading his blog while that one was coming to a close and his next campaign was getting started. It's one I've written about before, the famous Black City campaign, set in an alien city on a frozen island in a north sea, explored by pirates and vikings. Next he spent a fair bit of time building a Harrow House campaign, but I don't think there are actually any play reports in there. Instead I think he ran an ancient Greek themed version of the same idea, which became his Taenarum campaign. He ran one of the only Dwimmermont campaigns I've seen. More recently he started a 5e Illyria campaign, although it didn't last long. If you were going to check out additional materials on John's blog, I'd definitely recommend looking at the collected links for the Black City project.
   

 
Hill Cantons
Chris writes about his game sessions using a fictional news gazetteer. Usually he ledes with rumors and information to set up the next session, but usually follows up with information about what happened at his table recently. He also ran a Traveller campaign that he wrote about too. I've praised Chris' writing about undercity pointcrawls before. Another very cool idea of his is the Chaos Index, which allows player hijinks to cause escalating metaphysical disruptions to the campaign setting.
 

   
Tales from the Sorcerer's Skull
Most of Trey's recent play reports take place in his own wonderfully Oz-ian Land of Azurth setting. (It reminds me a lot of Wampus Country, as well.) Trey seems to frequently use well-known adventures, but re-skin them. Most recently his players visited a Yellow-Submarine-themed Misty Isle of the Eld, and before that they went to Castle Amber. Trey has a couple of books that collect his Weird Adventures and Strange Stars settings. He's currently working on something with Silver-Age-style supervillains, and (much beloved by me) his slowly accumulating science fantasy setting. The map below comes from his unnamed science fantasy world.
 

 
Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque
Jack meets my gold standard for play report tagging. All his play reports share a common tag. Each play report is also tagged with the campaign it took place in. And then his two longest-running campaigns - Krevborna and Umberwell - both have static pages so you can find all the reports in chronological order. I've actually played in Jack's Umberwell campaign.
 
For any of these play reports, good writing helps, but it's probably also important that your session was lively and your players enjoyed the experience. I don't think there's any writing style in the world that could make it enjoyable to read about the kinds of online games where you explore two rooms, spending half the session trying to solve a puzzle with no clues, and the other half in excruciating slow combat. Jack's sessions (that I've played in at least) typically involve a fair bit of exploration and investigation to gather clues, with a climactic battle at the end once you understand enough to confront and fight the source of the mystery.
 

 
Dungeon of Signs
Gus labels both his actual play reports and tags the individual campaigns they belong to. His play reports are mostly divided between four different campaigns. The first campaign Gus ran was based on the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, although it mostly took place in the campaign world outside the famous megadungeon, rather than inside it. His second campaign (or family of campaigns) is based inside his own HMS Apollyon setting. Gus also played in a Wampus country campaign (hosted, unsurprisingly, by Erik from the Wampus Country blog) and a Pavelhorn campaign (hosted by Brendan from Necropraxis). Gus wrote quite a few dungeons and adventures, and you can find them on his PDFs to Download page.
   

 
Monsters & Manuals
Nomisms writes lots and lots of setting material, including his well-known Yoon-Suin setting, but he has relatively few actual play reports. (He may have slightly more than I realize, because he tags his campaigns, but not his play reports, the two I found here are campaigns that only exist as actual play.) His Cruth Lowland campaign is, I think, set in a kind of Dark Ages northern Britain. Three Mysterious Weirdos takes place in a fantasy Edo Japan, much like his Valleys of the Winter People setting materials. Some other fun settings he's developed over time on the blog are Behind Gently Smiling Jaws, an Inception-style campaign that takes place in the mind of a dreaming immortal crocodile; New Troy and There Is Therefore A Strange Land, both of which are high-fantasy with fairy knights and interdimensional travel; and two I'm especially fond of - a planetcrawl through fantasy moons of Jupiter, and The Fixed World, where different parts of the world are always the same time of day and the same season, so Always-Winter-Always-Morning is near Spring-Morning and Winter-Noon, etc. You can see his map of it below.
   

 
In Places Deep
Almost all of Evan's play reports are from his long-running Nightwick Abbey campaign. If you've heard of Evan before, it's probably because of Nightwick, which you can see a partial map of below. I briefly played in one of Evan's online games, maybe a session or two, in his ancient Mesopotamia inspired Uz setting. More recently, Evan's written a couple of good retrospectives about what it takes to run a megadungeon campaign for as long as he has. Like Hill Cantons, most of the play reports here take the form of within-campaign fictional news reports. (I don't know the best way to assemble players for an open-table online campaign, but putting out a call for players on his blog seemed to work for Evan the time that I played.)
 

 
Hack & Slash
Courtney's session reports are mostly from awhile ago, and most of them are transcripts rather than summaries. Unfortunately, we don't get to see any of the actual play that goes into his Numenhalla megadungeon, pictured below. Courtney's blog shares a lot of his thoughts on player agency, and his great love for dungeon tricks and traps. Recently he's been publishing Numenhalla in segments, alongside advice for running a resource-management heavy megadungeon campaign using 5e.
   

   
Unofficial Games
Zzarchov's recent play reports are from his Xanthandu campaign, seen below, which I believe is set in a kind of fantasy Polynesia, or at least some sort of fantasy tropical island with a French colonial governor. A few are Neoclassical Geek Revival games (for which he also has example-of-play transcripts, which I am given to understand are lightly fictionalized versions of real events, emphasizing the use of his houserule mechanics). Zzarchov also played in Evan's Nightwick Abbey game, so some reports on that appear as well. If you recognize Zzarchov's name, it might be because he has written quite a few adventures, including Scenic Dunnsmouth, which uses dice-drops and playing cards to procedurally generate a Lovecraftian village, and Price of Evil, which uses similar techniques to generate random Gothic haunted houses. I'm also quite fond of his "seed tables" for generating random wilderness hex contents. These are each three related 1d8, 1d6, and 1d4 tables, where rolling triples 1-4 or doubles 5-6 gives additional results, which I think is a smart use of the dice.
   

 
False Machine
Patrick's earliest actual play posts are all his adventures in other people's campaigns. He mostly wrote these as first-person within-fiction narratives. More recently, his posts are about games he's running. First in his Islands of the Imprisoned Moon campaign, which I think takes place in a fantasy Polynesia, and second in his Syr Darya campaign set in Nomisms from Monsters & Manuals' Yoon Suin. His most recent post covers something like 11 sessions in one long go. I've mentioned Patrick's Deep Carbon Observatory on here before, and he also wrote Veins of the Earth (among others).
   

 
Blog of Holding
Paul has only a couple groups of play reports. He has one series of actual play in a setting based on the fictional game Mazes & Monsters. He has another series of play reports from a game he played with D&D designer Mike Monard. Paul doesn't really tag any of his posts. Those two series are unusual because they are tagged - but my favorite group of his play reports aren't. My favorite is Paul's "Downton & Dragons" campaign which combined D&D with Downton Abbey, and took place in four parts. You might have heard of Paul from his project to turn D&D's "random dungeon generator" into a dungeon map.
 

   
The Alexandrian
Justin's play reports all take place in his Ptolus campaign. After each play report, he also posts a post-mortem talking about some gamemastery decision he made for the session. Justin's blog also meets my gold standard (and may actually represent the high-water mark for organization) since he not only tags his play reports, and his post-mortems, and the campaign itself (so that you can view both together), he also has an index page linking to each entry. Justin's blog is also a treasure trove of good advice and interesting ideas, and he wrote the "Halls of the Mad Mage" dungeon that I've used on a couple occasions.
 

 
Planet Algol
Probably the best way to read Planet Algol's play reports is to go over to the sidebar of his blog, scroll down past the images, and start at the beginning of his "Algol Adventures" links. However, he has more play reports than show up in the sidebar, and there is a tag you can use to find them. While you're there, it's probably worth checking out his page of links to many of his campaign setting materials.

Henchman Abuse
Anomalous Subsurface Environment was one of the first OSR megadungeons, and I remember seeing someone point out that the guy who wrote it also had a hilarious blog where he wrote about his players exploring the place. It's really good. Pat does tag his play reports, but honestly, most of his posts are play reports, and the relatively few that aren't are all about him designing rooms and traps and monsters.
 

 
People Them with Monsters
Jeremy didn't write a lot of session reports, but they were mostly related to his evocative Outland campaign setting. Outland really captured my imagination, especially with the cool house rules document and cool character sheet. You can see a map of the setting below. Outland was similar to one being outlined by another blogger on the now-deleted blog called "A DM's Tale" (or something pretty similar). Both settings were human-focused, but had things like morlocks and demons rather than elves and goblins. It helps that Outland has a good name, for sure, but I liked the variety of weirdness he was creating (and I appreciated his willingness to admit in his reports when things didn't go the way he'd hoped). Today you might know Jeremy from his very helpful DCC reference document.

In their own ways, I think Planet Algol, ASE, and Outland are all inspired by or were responses to Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa setting. Carcosa came out a little before my time. By the time I started reading gaming blogs, Geoffrey had already deleted his and gone into semi-retirement. I wasn't there to see how people first reacted to his setting. I think I first read about it in some RPG trivia post that listed it alongside FATAL and The World of Synnibarr. But for people who were around at the time, it seems like the combination of sci-fi, fantasy, and weird horror tapped some deep vein of interest and inspiration. Which is probably why Carcosa is still interesting and still popular today. It's also why I still find Planet Algol, Henchman Abuse, and People Them With Monsters worthy of revisiting.

 
Dungeonskull Mountain
Paul's play reports are divided between two main campaigns. His more recent one is his Rifts misadventures campaign. Before that, he had a Demon Verge campaign, which was based on an idea Jeremy from People Them With Monsters also had - to use Dwarfstar games' Demonlord boardgame map as a wilderness hexmap. This is an idea I love, and so I really enjoyed reading Paul's reports on his campaign there.
 

   
Redbox Vancouver & Redbox Niagra
These aren't individuals' blogs, they're blogs maintained by D&D clubs. They're connected to, or share members with (I think?) Planet Algol, The Mule Abides, and the whole Dungeon World scene.
 
I first learned about them because RBV played some sessions in the Anomalous Subsurface Environment as part of their White Sandbox campaign (check session 40 to see what I mean). Poking around, I discovered that their Black Peaks campaign included adventures in Stonehell, and that they had a brief Planet Algol campaign as well.
 
Separately, reading about Barrowmaze on Discourse & Dragons led me to RBN and their ongoing campaign through Greg's dungeons, including now Forbidden Caverns of Archaia (Which is great, because Greg doesn't tag his play reports - there are plenty of entertaining adventures, but you really have to scour his archive to find them.)
 
It's really fascinating to read these guy's play reports, because they're clearly interested in old-school gaming, and obviously getting together frequently to play old-school D&D, and yet they're socially almost entirely disconnected from the corner of the OSR scene that I'm most familiar with. Reading their reports is like looking into some parallel world.
   

   
Savage Swords of Athanor
Doug's is the last of the old blogs in the "so old they're now defunct" section of my list. I think all of his play reports take place in his pseudo-Roman setting of Estarion. Like Jeremy from People Them With Monsters, he also has a cool house-rules document. In the sidebar to his blog, Doug also has a series of setting documents you can download. They're less like zines and more like a broadsheet or gazetteer, but still kind of cool and worth checking out, especially if ancient Rome is your thing.
 

 
Papers & Pencils
As I mentioned up at the beginning of this post, Nick is the one who inspired me to kick this whole list off. He doesn't actually tag his play reports, but he does maintain an index for each campaign, linking to each session in order. His first campaign was Dungeon Moon, which was huge and probably over-ambitious, and I like that he talks with humility about what he wanted to do and what went wrong. While it was too hard to run as a judge, if Gus from Dungeon of Signs is any indication, the players all enjoyed the depth and scale of the place. Nick's second campaign was On a Red World Alone, which was set on Mars, the eponymous red world. His most recent campaign, and the one whose index he just published recently is Fuck the King of Space, where the goal and attitude are pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the name. I like science fantasy and even just regular fantasy set in space, so I'm particularly fond of that aspect of Nick's GMing. In terms of referee advice, Nick's also written a list of post-game questions for the ref to ask themselves to help guide preparations for the next session. Several new bloggers a little further down my list have adopted these and started adding them to the end of their own session reports.
   

 
Bernie the Flumph
Josh's play reports tend to alternate between a campaign set in Sine Nomine's Silent Legions, and various DCC adventures. I've played online in a game Josh was running once, set in his own Sanctum of the Snail adventure. I enjoy Josh's love for mollusks, and his personal quest to stat up the Flumph in every ruleset he can.

 
Against the Wicked City
Except for one early post about playing D&D with his toddler son, all of Joseph's play reports are about a group of players collectively known as Team Tsathoggua, who've been adventuring in a fantasy Southeast Asia that includes the Island of Purple-Haunted Putrescence and Qelong. Joseph's players are full of schemes, and seem to be constantly trying to set themselves up as local rulers. Joseph's campaign materials outside this game mostly focus on his linked Wicked City and Great Road settings, which are part of a fantasy Central Asia. He also writes reviews, mostly of horror-themed adventures and rulesets, most recently a series of posts about the newest version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. You might also know his essay on the aesthetics of ruin, or his collection of weird character classes that's available to download from his sidebar.
 

   
Coins & Scrolls
Skerples has an ongoing campaign with a fairly stable group of players. Over time, his play reports have transitioned from being set in his own Tomb of the Serpent Kings and Steam Hill dungeons to taking place in his version of The Veins of the Earth. Skerples is notable for being very into accurate medieval and feudal history, while running a game where most of his players are insect people. (Technically his list of player races includes many non-insect options, but in practice, his games end up feeling more weird than if his players mostly played as hedgehogs and mice.) Skerples is also and enthusiastic adopter of the Goblin Laws of Gaming, making him one of the founding members of what I would consider to be the slightly separate GLOGosphere of OSR bloggers. (You can see all of Goblin Punch's GLOG posts here, and find all the pdfs of his rules here.) You may also recall that once when I was reviewing Skerples' vignettes of fantasy epochs, I said something like "Skerples should collect these into a book and offer it for sale." Well, Skerples did in fact collect them into a book and offered it for sale. My influence on the project is parodically denounced in the acknowledgments.
     

 
Throne of Salt
Dan is also part of the new crowd of GLOGosphere bloggers. His recent play reports all take place in his own planes-hopping Danscape setting. His games sound fun, and they remind me of that fact that virtually anyone who runs an online game with an open table that they announce on G+ is going to end up with a veritable "who's who?" of celebrity players. (Well, as "celebrity" as it gets among the OSR blogosphere anyway. But Dan's games end up being just as much celebrity games as Jeff of Jeff's Gamesblog's do.)
 
Eldritch Fields
Tamas has apparently been around for a few years, but I only just found his blog. He doesn't have many play reports, but there's quite a bit of variety, ranging from a Conan-style raid on a wizard's tower, to Cavegirl's Game Stuff's Gardens of Ynn, to his own adventure inside a giant fish.
 

     
The Scones Alone
Brian's blog is pretty new, so he only has a handful of play reports, all set in the same campaign, exploring A Red and Pleasant Land using Into the the Odd rules. Still, his reports are interesting, I appreciate his self-reflection, and there's a soft place in my heart for anyone who attempts to bring in NES games like Dragon Warrior and the original Castlevania as inspiration for their games.
 

 
Bearded Devil
Most of Jonathan's recent blog posts are actual play reports. I heard about Bearded Devil from seeing someone praising his hand-drawn city maps. They are gorgeous. He also draws headshots of all his player characters and NPCs. So I came for the art, but the play reports themselves are lively and interesting. One recent game took place in a city built inside the stomach of a flying psychic whale. Another involved an evil alchemist who was synthesizing fake royal jelly to usurp the throne become the false queen of the wasp-women.
 

   
 
People who run games seem to be much more likely to write play reports than players are. (And the players who write play reports seem to be players who are themselves also judges and referees.) I take notes almost every time I play or run a game, but I admit, I'm not always fast to write them up properly. Probably there are other people in a similar situation.
 
Despite this, I do think there's a real value in people sharing their gaming experiences. Seeing how other people run their games can give you ideas for things you want to do (or things you desperately want to avoid doing!) and it gives you a sense of what the community is like, what other players and other judges are doing at their tables. If you want to know what works well, what's hard to pull off, what people usually pay attention to, and what they ignore, there's no better way to find out than by reading play reports, especially if they come with some sort of post-mortem talking about how the referee prepped, how they made key decisions, or anything else important that came up during play.
 
I really like learning what's unique about people's home campaigns, but I think it's also quite valuable to see what happens when two different judges or two different groups play through common dungeons, or use two versions of the same campaign setting. First because it's important for a community to have a shared repertoire and language, a shared collective memory of key or formative events, and secondly because it's by seeing how different people interpret the same game text that you really learn how the game is played, you really see what's possible within the structures the game establishes.
 
In addition to post-mortems, I also really like to see lists of the player characters and retainers, lists of encounters/combats, lists of treasures found, and lists of XP awarded. Papers & Pencils' list of post-session questions might also be catching on. I find that these kinds of summaries are a good GM-aide (I often don't know how much experience to award until after I've gone through the list of everything the players did while writing up the report), and I enjoy them as a reader as well. Not only do they help me keep track of all the moving parts of the session report, they again show me how different judges adjudicate similar situations.