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.

Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 11 Nov 2018 & 14 Dec 2018

Session 8 Characters
  
Sweet Nell (innkeeper, 2nd level Warrior)
- played by Todd

Stella (trapper)
Dagmar (lawyer)
Hellen (porter)
Tess (draughtswoman)
- played by Cheryl

Session 8 - 11 Nov 2018
A week after the Demon Queen Hezzemuth was summoned to the mortal realm, and the town of Brimstone was in absolute chaos. New buildings were rising directly out of the ground, so tall they scraped the sky, tall like Chicago or New York, yet seemingly molded from clay or carved directly from the earth, rather than built by human hands.

This was the demon architecture of the demon ant queen! But as this new city flourished, Brimstone suffered. The town's old wooden buildings were destroyed as the new structures rose up. Townswomen Stella, Dagmar, Hellen, and Tess all lost their homes, but rather than move into the overcrowded campgrounds where so many townspeople were sheltering since their lives were destroyed by the demon, the four women sought out the help and advice of Nell, famous around town for trying to fight and oppose Hezzemuth.

They came, hats in hands, to the cabin at the edge of town that Nell shared with her other friends, and she led them on an errand to Pemberton Nimby's tent out in the campgrounds. The grounds were crowded with makeshift tents and lean-tos, and they had to pick their way carefully through bodies of people lying out in grass, trying to escape the crowding inside their shelters, drinking their cares away in the sun. Pemberton was overseeing a pair of hired hands packing away the contents of his tent. "OH," he said, in his creepy Peter Lorre voice, "so good to SEE you. I've been thinking of taking a little trip. The WEATHER, you see, it doesn't agree with me."
 
Nell agreed that heading out of town for awhile sounded like a good idea. She turned over two of the spellbooks they'd stolen found in the Freemason's hotel room, much to Pemberton's delight. He returned the pair of fossils she'd lent him, - "with some SPECIAL modifications" - and wished him well on his trip. Nell led her four new companions back to the cabin, but as they walked, they noticed ominous black smoke ahead of them, and when they got closer, they saw that the cabin was on fire!

Nell unhitched the party's horses, and Stella, Dagmar, Hellen, and Tess stole borrowed four to ride alongside her. As they rode, Nell told the other women of an old fairytale she knew, about the so-called Gold Soul Mine, where one day all the miners vanished, and the town became haunted by ghosts made of gold-colored light. She rubbed her chin as she rode, and said she reckoned it might be about time to go chase down that old fairy tale. And so, with little more than the clothes on their backs, the five set off on a week-long ride, living rough on the land, before finally arriving at a ghost town, where a broken sign out front announced "Welcome to -"

They explored the town a bit. The buildings were all empty, half the doors had fallen off their hinges, half the windows were broken. The weeds grew tall and dust blew through the sand-covered streets. Nell guessed it had been empty for years, maybe decades. Her own mother told her that Gold Soul tall tale as a bedtime story.

With their pick of campsites, the group moved into the biggest saloon in town, and brought the horses inside with them. Searching for provisions, they found a few bottles with a finger or two of dregs left in their bottoms. Stella found a jar of pickled eggs, Dagmar found a cracker tin that was full of dusty powder, Hellen found a barrel of pickles that had all turned to slime, and Tess found a bag of dried beans. Nell found a side of salted beef that appeared to still be preserved, but after she ate some, it quickly poisoned her. The other women stuck to a dinner of pickled eggs and boiled beans. Between the rotted foodstuffs, Nell's illness, and the horses, their barroom campsite smelled foul by the morning.

Despite her stomach ache, Nell insisted that they head over to the mine entrance in the morning. They saw it was boarded up, though the boards were rotten and falling away. The weeds and grass were dead all around the mine entrance, and the few nearby trees were sickly, with emaciated branches and drooping yellow leaves.

Session 8 Gains
a new home-base in the ghost-town saloon
2 provisions

Session 8 Losses
the former home base (burned down)
the town of Brimstone (taken over by demons)

Goldsoul Mine map by Martin O

 
Session 9 Characters


Chaus Hussar (cavalryman, 1st level Wizard)
- played by Peter

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

Session 9 - 14 Dec 2018
Chaus Hussar remembered Nell's fairy tales about the fabled Gold Soul Mines, and so when Brimstone was ravaged and their cabin burnt down, he too rode out to the old ghost town to meet her there. While the newcomers improved the group's camp inside the grand saloon, Chaus and Nell went back to the mine entrance, marked as it was by dead grass and dying, yellow-leafed trees. Chaus cast a spell that allowed him to climb like a spider, and with Nell clinging to his back, descended into the pit of the mine.

Down the pit they arrived in a small cave where the floor was covered in rocks like skipping stones. They saw a crawlway leading out horizontally, and a hole in the floor, marked by graffiti reading "None Here Have Mercy". Deciding to heed the warning, they crawled through the shallow half-tunnel leading away to the right.

Halfway through their crawl, they began to hear stringed musicians playing "The Blue Danube" waltz on ukulele, banjo, and guitar. They hurried through the crawl and arrived in a slender, cylindrical cave with only a hole in the floor and the sound of a rushing underground river coming from below. As they stood there contemplating, the sound of the waltz grew louder, and a few moments later, a trio of ghostly musicians arrived. The ghosts were rude, demanding to know who Chaus and Nell were before immediately dismissing them, "Well I've never heard of you!" Chaus was unfailingly polite and convinced the ghosts to continue on their way, playing another refrain of waltz. The ghostly trio disappeared through the hole in the floor, while Chaus and Nell decided to crawl back to the first cave they'd entered.

Returning to their starting point, the pair decided to climb down through the hole in the floor. This led to a narrow shaft that they descended by bracing their bodies against the back wall. At the bottom, they reached a much larger cave, and shared some of Nell's chewing tobacco to help revive them from their fatigue. After their rest, they inspected three possible exits - another hole in the floor, another path leading off to the right, and a slope leading upward and to the left. They elected to go in a new direction, and waded through hip-deep gravel as they made their way up the slope to the next cave. Along the way, they passed a handful of picks and shovels, all with broken shafts and dented metal heads.

Practically swimming upstream by the end, the pair bellyflopped into a new cave with obvious, un-mined veins of gold lining the walls. Nell thought back on her mother's bedtime stories. She recalled that the miners allegedly turned to gold, and their ghosts haunted the townspeople, who then all ran away. None of the fresh gold in these walls bore a human silhouette, so Nell declared it safe to mine. Much to their chagrin though, neither she nor Chaus had much in the way of mining equipment. They'd been lucky to leave Brimstone with their lives, and hadn't had time to pack. They used some of their other gear as makeshift scraping tools and managed to get about $100 in gold dust and pebbles to break off the wall. They divvied up their find and slipped and slid back down to the lower cave. Once there, they did their best to pull more gravel down the slope to try to block off the room entrance, hoping to discourage anyone else who might come by from jumping their claim.

They took advantage of the narrow walls to make a relatively easy climb back up to the first cave in the mine, bracing themselves against the wall and then half-walking their way up. As they lay on the floor catching their breath though, a half dozen gold-soul ghosts flew into the room through the other shaft. The ghosts had been dead and trapped so long they forgot what it was like to be human, and looked more like blobs of gold-colored light, but Nell had no doubt these were the ghosts her mother's fairy tale had warned her about. Chaus Hussar cast his spider-climbing spell again, and carried Nell up and out with all alacrity. Bobbing along like jellyfish in the sea, the gold-soul ghosts followed, but couldn't catch up with them, and tonight, at least, came no further than the entrance to the mine.

Nell and Chaus made their way back to the saloon where they went to bed on empty stomachs, as the women maintaining the campsite had no luck finding more provisions. Over the next week, Nell, Chaus, and the others made a more systematic search of the houses in the ghost town, and managed to cobble together a decent set of camping supplies.

Session 9 Gains
$100 in gold dust
assorted rations and camping supplies

Session 9 Losses
none, for a change

Session 8 & 9 XP
Unfortunately for Cheryl, I don't think that Stella, Dagmar, Hellen, or Tess have done enough to read first level (sorry, Cheryl!) As for all the others, I decided that anyone who wanted to could simply level up, or start a new character at level 1 for Session 10.


Post-Mortem
Both these sessions were cut somewhat short by audio trouble. My regular online group uses Roll20 for our dice and maps, but we had trouble with the Roll20 audio early on, and set up a Discord channel to use just during our games. It's been sort of hit and miss. It was especially bad during Session 8, but still caused us a few problems in Session 9. Then we played an entirely separate mini-campaign (which hopefully I'll post about here soon) with no troubles at all. Then most recently, poor Discord audio threatened to ruin Session 10, but we switched back to Roll20's audio to good effect. 

Probably the biggest difficulty in online play is getting everyone signed up and logged in on the same platform, and then getting that platform to function ... correctly ... for everybody ... at the same time. (I mean the BIGGEST biggest difficulty in online play is probably the same one as in-person play, just getting enough people together, period, to have a quorum so you can run the game. That problem is the reason I've played so few sessions between last fall and today. But functionality is still probably the biggest online-specific difficulty.)
 
As an aside, I was thinking the other day about the scene in Bladerunner where Deckerd is at a bar, and goes to a phonebooth to videocall Rachel. I was thinking about how that scene is like the very definition of the idea of retro-futurism. At the time, the possibility of placing a video call seemed SO futuristic that I doubted the technology would exist in my lifetime. Today, when everyone owns a mobile phone with a built in video camera, the same scene seems positively archaic. And the really quaint thing about it isn't that Deckerd still goes to place his call from a public, landline, payphone. No, what's really charmingly old-fashioned about it all is the idea that Deckerd would seek out even a modicum of privacy for his call, rather than just ringing up Rachel from right there at the bar, and shouting his intimate conversation at top volume, surrounded by a audience of strangers who were all doing the same thing.

Anyway, these sessions are kind of transitional. After the debacle in the Maw of Hezzemuth being summoned successfully, my players indicated that they were interested in moving on to some new adventuring sites. The random campaign event generator I've been using said that there was a fire in town that directly affected the player characters - which was about as perfect a coincidence as I could possibly ask for. Since they were leaving anyway, I decided to play up the destructive influence of Hezzemuth's presence, as she started erecting termite mound skyscrapers and generally remaking the town as she saw fit. If they ever decide to go back, Brimstone will be quite a different place than they left in.

In the meantime, my players' wish to visit some greener pastures meshed well with my desire to try running a few different  pre-written adventures I've had my eye on, just reskinned to fit into this campaign. At the moment, running something as a DCC western adventure is currently the easiest way for me to run it. I feel full of new ideas, and I'm eager to try something different, but I don't have anything else finalized or ready yet. So for now, I'm enjoying trying out a few wish-list adventures as reskins.

The first up is Goodberry Monthly's Gold Soul Mines. We didn't make it very far in because of the aforementioned audio problems, and - spoiler alert - Session 10 takes place somewhere else, so I'm not sure if we'll be back. Gold Soul uses the Veins of the Earth cave generation rules and nomenclature, making it easily the most claustrophobic space the campaign has explored thus far. I think my players were pretty unnerved by the gold-soul ghosts as well, so I'm not sure how eager they'll be to return to the scene of this particular crime.

Play Report - I2TO Salt Factory

Over the winter holidays, Joshua Burnett from the Bernie the Flumph! blog ran an Into the Odd adventure, and I had the opportunity to play in it. I thought at first it might be something Chris McDowall wrote for Electric Bastionland, because the description of the exterior of the salt factory was pitch-perfect in terms of my understanding of the setting for I2TO, but later discoveries inside the factory revealed similarities to some of Josh's other ideas.
 
 

My initial character for this game was "Pinky", so named because of her resplendent all-pink outfit. (Picture noble attire from the Revolutionary War / French Revolution era, complete with tricorn hat, just all in various shades of pink.) Pinky was joined by one-armed "Lefty", Bob, Aldo, and "Pithy", who started the game with a magic book that let him speak in a universally-understandable glossolalia language.
 
This crew of five down-on-their-luck Bastionians heard a rumor that a safe route to an abandoned salt-processing factory had recently been discovered in the Underground. They sensed a business opportunity in "salvaging" materials from the site, and hired famed underguide Nix Perpendicular to lead them to it. Nix also brought along a handful of replacement characters "tourists" to help pad out his billing. The journey was uneventful, passing mostly though Bastion's enormous sewers before abruptly arriving in a large cavern. The stalactites here were all made of salt, and refracted their torchlight like rainbows.
 
The salt factory looked like a pile of red-painted metal cubes, stacked and overlapped seemingly at random. It stood at the center of the cavern, surrounded by a lake of milky white liquid. A bridge made of large copper plates sitting on thick copper cables hung over the lake and led to the factory. The bridge led to a large red-metal door. A rickety iron catwalk wrapped irregularly around parts of the factory as well. Nix took them as far as the bridge, then sat down to play solitaire dominoes and informed the adventurers that he'd wait 8 hours, and not a minute longer. Aldo looked across at the factory, and tried to persuade Nix to stay for 12 hours. Nix eventually relented and agreed to 10, but now sat grumbling about how his wife would be furious with him for coming home late.
 
The group worried that the bridge might be electrified, but couldn't see any obvious power source connecting to it. Bob and Aldo went across one at a time without incident. Lefty went next, and halfway across, the copper panel he stood on started tipping from side to side. He made it safely across, but the plate toppled into the milky liquid, which seemed to boil and froth as the plate sank into it. Pithy tiptoed up to the gap, then tightrope walked across the gap between the plates. Pinky ran across the bridge, sending the whole thing swaying violently, and threw herself across the gap, just making the long-jump to safety.
 
The group assembled on the scaffolding in front of the main door. It was painted red, but the metal underneath was obviously badly rusted. The lock was pitted and salt-corroded. Lefty decided to follow the scaffolding around the building. On one side, it came to a dead end where the metal had rusted away and collapsed. On the other, side it led to a side-door. The group decided to force open the main door, which screamed as metal rubbed against metal. Worried about the noise, Pithy used his book to call out greetings in the universal tongue, but received no reply. They forced the door the rest of the way open and went in, finding what looked like a locker room or break room, coated in a layer of clear salt like glass. They saw four workers "flash-frozen" in salt sitting at a table where they had been playing cards. There was a metal staircase leading up, another leading down, and a door leading straight out.
 
They quickly case and search the room. Pinky opened the door and found that it led out into a long hallway. Lefty checked the card table to try to steal the bets, but saw only a handful of coins. He also saw a brass key hanging from one of the worker's belts; when he grabbed it, all four dead workers and the table and chairs shattered like glass and crumbled to the floor. Lefty tried looking nonchalant, but did stoop to recover the handful of coins from the floor. Pithy searched the supply shelves and found a cigar box full of over a hundred silver coins. Bob located a powerful aetheric torch light, although it had no battery.
 
Instead of using any of this room's exits, the adventurers decided to check the side entrance. They used the scaffolding to go around the building, although it too began to groan and sway ominously as they walked. This door was covered in peeling grey paint, and was locked tight. Pinky got out her pocket watch and set an alarm to go off in 9 hours' time. Bob got out his portable ram and eventually managed to batter down the door, though each hit from the ram echoed like a crash of thunder. The door opened to reveal an anteroom, with its floor covered in hundreds of knife-like salt shards growing up from the ground. They decided not to risk the catwalk again at this time, so Bob used his ram to sweep a path clear, creating noise like a thousand shattering glasses as he did. The group went through the room and opened the door to the hall, with Pinky standing ready with her musket to cover their progress.
 
The hall is empty of life, though they find a bank of lockers along one wall. They begin breaking them open. Pinky found a worker's protective gear - coveralls, safety glasses, and hardhat. She decided to put them on over her clothes, which were already getting coated in salt. Lefty found a "World's Greatest Dad" mug. Bob found a musket, but having one already, gave it to Lefty. Aldo found a security guard's armor. Pithy found an aetheric battery that could fit into Bob's new lantern, and when they put it in, it lit up double bright.
 
The first room they found off the hall had large hole corroded into the floor. Shining Bob's lantern down the hole, they saw a catwalk running around the wall, and a distant floor probably two stories below. They also heard the faint sound of a baby crying coming up from the hole. In a building that had been abandoned for decades, maybe centuries. They quickly backed out of the room and keep exploring.
 
Down the hall they entered another room. The walls were decorated with crude graffiti of slogans like "HONEY YOU NO EAT!" In the corner of the room was a glass insect's nest swarming with what look like red-glass ants. Through the glass walls of the hive they saw a reservoir of opalescent liquid. Pithy used his magic book to try conversing with the ants. He heard them say "Work work work work work." Pithy tried asking politely for the ants to give him honey. They began scurrying around, clearly agitated. "They want to steal the honey! There is naught but work! There is naught but honey! Release the alarm pheromones!" Only a moment later, the floor shook and they both felt and heard footsteps running toward them down the hall, and a voice screamed "Who's stealing my honey?!"
 
Pinky looked down the hall and saw the silhouette of a black bear charging toward them. She tossed a bomb into the hall and ducked behind the doorframe. The bomb exploded, wrecking the hall, but the vantablack bear kept coming, though its movements were slowed, and it was bleeding profusely. Bob popped around the corner and got off a shot with his musket, finally felling the beast, which looked like a perfectly flat, perfectly black silhouette no matter which angle it was viewed from. Bob and Pithy went into the hall to skin the bear. Lefty used animal repellent to disperse the ants, who all fled for the corners of the room. Lefty used his new mug to scoop up some of their opalescent honey, while Pinky broke off a honey-filled chunk of the hive and wrapped it in the leather apron that came with her new coveralls. (3 doses opalescent honey, effect unknown.) Bob donned the bear pelt like a cape, wrapping its arms around his neck. Pinky smeared bear's blood on her face, hoping the smell would frighten off any other animals lurking in the ruins.
 
After their harrowing encounter, and with the structural integrity of this whole section of the building compromised by the bomb blast, the group made their way back to the security door, and used the scaffolding to return to the main entrance and the salted-over break room. On the walk around, Bob used his new aetheric lantern to inspect the exterior of the building, but the magi-technical light didn't reveal any new features. In the breakroom, the stairs leading down seemed bent out of shape since the last time they were in the room, and the door to the hall had been broken down. They decided to go upstairs.
 
Up the stairs, the group arrived in an office with a half-dozen ruined, salt-crusted desks. Pithy found the least damaged desk and searched it, discovering a ledger that recorded the production of various metallic and mineral salts, measured in archaic units that no longer had any meaning. He put it into his pack next to his magic book. The other desks were too badly damaged to recover anything. Pinky checked the office's door. It was decorated with a brass crest like a swarm of serpents with red jeweled eyes. As Pinky got close, the eyes lit up and she heard the hum of electricity. She backed away, and the sound stopped. Lefty inspected the door, and the whine started again, louder than before, and the air began to smell like ozone. Lefty took out the brass key he stole earlier and used it to unlock the door, and the mechanism powered down again, although Lefty's hair stood upright.
 
Through this protected door, they entered another room where the walls were covered with glass screens, mostly broken and burnt. In the center of the room was a throne with an emaciated corpse wearing strange mechanical armor, somehow wired into the rest of the room. As they stepped closer, the corpse opened its eyes and looked directly at them. "Have you come looking for work?" Speaking for the group, Pithy said yes. "Very well. Report for work at the refinery on Floor 5. Here are your pass keys." As the corpse spoke, four red metal cubes shimmered into existence in the air in front of them, and each explorer grabbed one. Pithy asked how to get to the fifth floor, and the figures eyes turned somehow angry and it began standing up out of the chair. "Between Floor 4 and Floor 6." They all quickly backed out of the room, and as they left, the corpse eased itself back into a sitting position. They shut the door and Lefty locked it behind them.
 
They returned to the break room and went down the damaged stairs, and at the bottom saw a sign saying "6". The room the stairs lead to looked horribly corroded, and there was a dead dog lying in the middle of the floor. Pity used his book and asked "Alive, woof woof?" but got no response. He approached, and the floor collapsed under him. There was a sickening thump and then silence from below. Bob tied a rope around his waist and the other end to the stairs and rappelled carefully down through the hole in the floor. Pinky approached the dog, saw that it was wearing a bejeweled collar with a tag that said "Rex", and managed to work it free from the corpse. She put it on, thinking she might be able to resell it later.

On the level below, Bob found himself in some kind of workshop for assembling clockworks. Pithy's dying body lay in the middle of the floor. Bob managed to revive Pithy and gave him some water to sip. They heard the sound of at least two crying babies coming from just beyond the room's doors. Bob quickly retied his rope around Pithy, climbed up to the floor above, and then with Pinky's help, hauled Pithy back into the corroded room. Just then Aldo came staggering down the stairs from the break room. "Oh thank god!" he exclaimed in relief, "I thought I lost you guys!" Bob swore under his breath. "Goddammit I thought we lost that guy." The others showed Aldo their hand-sized red cubes. They were all perfectly shiny and clean - the only things in good condition they'd seen so far - and appeared to be identical.
 
Aldo tries to impress his comrades by breaking down one of the doors leading out of the room, but although they look as corroded as the floor Pithy fell through, they're remarkably solid. After making a terrible racket, he finally managed to kick one down, then drew his long-axe and led the way into the hall. They came to a room with a catwalk around its perimeter but no floor, and a hole corroded into the ceiling. A story below them, they saw a large chamber filled with pipes and vats, but no obvious way to get down. Aldo led them around the catwalk to another door, this one in much better condition. Aldo tapped the door, and something tapped back twice. He tapped again, and got another two taps back.
 
Aldo asked "Is anyone there?" A voice answered "no!" Aldo asked again, "Could you open the door, please?" The voice answered back, angry, "You open your door please!" Aldo remained polite, "But we asked you first?" The voice became even angrier, "Don't talk to ME about politics!" Aldo stepped aside to let Bob have a try. Bob noticed a keyhole with dim light coming through, and more dim light spilling out from under the door. "I'm Bob" he tried, "What's your name?" The voice sounded less angry this time. "Bob, Bob, we're all named Bob." Aldo piped up "I'm Aldo!" but the voice corrected him, angry again, "No, you're Bob." Bob tried passing his red metal key cube through the keyhole, and a moment later they heard a grinding, crunching sound. "Po-ta-to chip stale" said the voice behind the door. Unfortunately, they also heard another sound, a tinkling and clinking like glass and metal bumping into each other. Three multi-legged crystalline creatures came onto the catwalk, using the door the party had entered through.
 
Sensing that it would take too long to talk their way through the door, Aldo rushed the creatures with his long-axe while Bob, Lefty, and Pinky let off a volley from their muskets. The creatures were quickly reduced to shards. Pinky sifted through the wreckage and found a fang that she thought she could use as a dagger. (d4 damage, STR save or lose 1d8 STR due to electrolyte leech.) With their immediate problem resolved, they turned back to the door. Bob tried again, "Would you like another potato chip?" The voice seemed agreeable, "Yup, just go ahead and slide that under the door there." Bob had them right where he wanted them, "I'm sorry, this one's too big to fit under, you'll have to open the door." The door opened out toward Bob, revealing a filthy humanoid with red rimmed eyes, a lengthy beard, scabrous leprous skin, wrapped in bandages. Bob screamed in horror and kicked the door closed, it bounced off the humanoid, knocked it to the floor, and rebounded open.

As the door swung open, the adventurers had only a moment to take in the scene, the floor covered in filthy carpets and a dead body, and a half-dozen more bearded, bandaged humanoids staring out at the party with revenge in their red-rimmed eyes. Bob fired his musket, instantly killing another of the horrible men, and Lefty and Pithy joined to kill two more. Aldo yelled "I really don't want to be doing this!" before charging into the room with his long-axe. Two of the awful men leapt onto Pithy and Aldo and began scratching and biting them with their filth-crusted fingernails, their slavering mouths. Pinky executed Pithy's attacker with her musket, and Aldo managed to kill his with his axe. Pithy approached Aldo and poured rum onto his already-infected wounds, drawing a yelp from Aldo.

Searching the room revealed mostly more layers of blankets and rugs, all soaked with sweat and other ordure, but also a metal card with a key pattern cut into it, and a glorious bejeweled halberd, which Aldo took. The horrible men had barricaded the only other door out of the room with piles of rolled-up carpets, and graffiti reading "BEWARE THE DESPICABLE INFANT!" was scrawled near the door. They listened at the door but didn't hear any crying this time. A second door out was secured with a simple latch.

Bob led the way this time, through the un-barred door and down a hall that was lit from the far end by a vibrant green glow. They arrived in a room that seemed to be filled with light, all emanating from a smooth crystalline statue of a naked woman, who shone brighter than the aetheric torch with sickly green light. The statue stood on a plinth with a dusty sign and a level. Pinky got close to wipe the dust from the sign so she could read it. It said "QUEEN PLUTONIUM, OUR LADY OF HIGH ATOMIC WEIGHTS", and up close, Pinky could see that the statue was hollow, made of clear glass and filled with a glowing green liquid. Everyone took cover behind Aldo as he prepared to flip the lever from a distance using the tip of his new bejeweled halberd. The liquid began pouring out of the statue's mouth, viscous and ooze-like. As the liquid level dropped, the group could just see the handle of a sword floating suspended in the liquid. Pinky shot the statue with her musket, causing it to burst open, and the ooze splashed out all at once and started advancing toward the party. Pinky ran forward, leapt over the ooze, and grabbed the sword in its scabbard. She nearly wrenched her arm from her socket; it was incredibly heavy. Aldo tried to hold back the ooze with his new halberd, but only succeeded in slicing it in half. One side of the bisected monster approached him and burned his clothes and flesh as it lashed him with pseudopods. The other reared up and crashed onto Pinky like a wave, and as it flowed away from where she'd stood, the only thing that remained was the dull-metal weapon. Aldo lit and dropped the bomb he'd been carrying and chased everyone else back into the hall. After the explosion, no trace of the statue or plinth remained, although the room still glowed faintly green, and the sword laid undamaged on the floor.

As the party watched, the other door to the room popped open, and in walked "The Brain," a handsome, intelligent fellow with an Orson Welles voice and only one arm (and my second character). The Brain picked up the sword, pulled it from its scabbard to examine it. He saw that the blade was a beautiful, almost glowing metal beneath the dull grey of the lead scabbard, but also realized that it was too heavy for him to wield effectively as a weapon, and so strapped it to his back as a collector's piece. (d10, ignores armor, chance of radiation poisoning, requires 13 STR to use.) Retracing their steps, they returned to the first room they encountered on this level, the one with the hole at the bottom of the steps that Pithy earlier fell through. They used the rope they'd tied off earlier to rappel down into the clockwork workroom.

This time, the group searched the cabinets of the workspace. Bob found a bomb, Lefty found a rocket, and Aldo found some very high-quality tools. Bob and Pithy listened at the two doors leading out of the room. One was silent, the other revealed the soft sound of an infant wailing in the distance. The group agreed to open the silent door, but it seemed to be blocked from the other side. Bob used his portable ram to batter the door down, again making a sound like thunder as the ram slammed against the metal door. When the thunder stopped, everyone could clearly hear the angry infant screaming coming from very nearby.

Inside the room, the see three skeletons wearing tattered coveralls and security badges. Aldo found some archaic armor and an accompanying shield. Pithy found an antique blunderbuss, and Lefty found what he thought was a flash-bang grenade. Looking up at the ceiling, they saw small holes like some liquid had once been dripping through from the floor above. All the while that they searched, the sound of the infant crying grew closer and louder. Losing their collective nerves, the adventurers ran for their lives calmly decided on an orderly and strategic retreat from the site. They climbed up the rope, climbed the stairs to the break room, and made their way back across the bridge. They found Nix Perpendicular playing backgammon with some of the tourists he'd brought. He was pleased that they'd made it back before even the original 8 hours were up.

Play Report - DCC Sanctum of the Snail

Just before it was released, I had the chance to playtest The Sanctum of the Snail, a DCC adventure by Josh Burnett from the Bernie the Flumph! blog. The following play report is partially narrated by my lone surviving character, Little Matchstick Greta, the guild beggar. For reasons that will become clear, halfway through the adventure she became incredibly whiny. In my head, she sounds just like the character "Flip" from Connie Willis' novel Bellwether.

Sadly, none of us played as Starfire or Captain Planet.

    
"It wasn't MY fault we got in a shipwreck! The captain was supposed take us all the way to the CITY, not crash us into some ISLAND!"

A group of travelers had all booked passage on the good ship Starfish to seek a new life in the distant city of Xothma-Ghul. They almost made it too, but shipwrecked on a tiny island only a day away from their destination.

My characters were Greta, Princess Persimmon the noble, Sally Sneakers the cobbler, and Spanakopita the halfling mariner.

Todd started out with Lisk the tailor, Raymundo the herbalist, Orvis the dwarven herder (and his sow Marie), and Tammy the hunter.

Gilbert and Doyce had Kyle the dwarven stonemason, Mournath the dwarven blacksmith, Brian the wizard's apprentice, Geof the woodcutter, Bob the mercenary, Jack the ropemaker, Phil the other mercenary, and Norman the baker.


"Anyway, it was the sharkboys who attacked US! We weren't even DOING anything!"

The travelers got washed ashore amidst a raging storm to find the captain laying dead on the rocks before them, and a gang of 8 hillbilly sharkboys clambering up onto the island to attack them. They saw the sinking remains of the Starfish to one side, and a stone door cut into the rock of the island to the other.

The dwarven brothers Kyle and Mournath were the MVPs of this combat, and frankly, of the entire session. ("No! It was me! I'm the most valuable EVERYTHING!") They recovered the captain's iron khopesh sword, used it to kill one of the sharks, pushed open the heavy stone door, defended it until everyone was inside, and then got it closed again.

Meanwhile, Raymundo, Tammy, Geof, Bob, and Norman got torn to shreds with nothing to show for it. Greta, Princess Persimmon, Sally, Spanikopita, Brian, Jack, and Phil only survived because they ran for it. Lisk killed one sharkboy with his scissors, then got eaten too. Orvis only survived because he threw his beloved sow Marie to the sharks, who ate her instead of chasing him.

The sharkboys did a fair bit of bumbling too. The rolled at least 3 fumbles, resulting in a sharkboy tripping over his own tail and faceplanting, another breaking his teeth biting the rocks, and a third pratfalling by tripping over a sharkboy corpse.


"I didn't even WANT to go in that old door! I wanted to go back to the SHIP! It was those dwarf brothers who MADE us do down there! It was THEIR idea!"

Spanakopita realized the tide was coming in and that the whole island was going to submerge when it did. Fortunately, the stonemasonry on the door was excellent, and it fit so well no water leaked in. Kyle used a rope and a flask of oil to make a lantern, and Mournath used a second rope to create a handhold as the group descended a giant staircase that simply sheered off like a cliff to either side.

Some ways down the stairs, but not yet at the bottom, they encountered a partially collapsed bridge lit by candles, and a golden door that seemed to glow in the candle-light on the far side. Really all that remained of the bridge were two support pillars. Orvis leapt across the gap to the first pillar, and it immediately began crumbling beneath his feet. He leapt to the second, and then across to the far side, but the others were now trapped with the gap between them too far to jump over. While the others waited, Orvis found the skeleton of a dead elf on the landing and immediately began rifling through its supplies. He found a 20' length of copper chain, a heavy basket, and empty barrel, a rusty wheelbarrow, a lead statue of a duck, several iron spikes, and a flask of oil. Ropemaker Jack managed to toss one end of a length of rope to Orvis, and they each hammered down their sides with iron spikes.

Princess Persimmon tried crossing this makeshift rope-bridge first, and attempted to show off by walking across it like a slack-line. Halfway across, she fell off and plummeted to her death. ("I didn't tell her to walk like that! She said it was SAFER that way!") One at a time, the others started shimmying across the chasm by hanging upside down on the rope. At one point, their end gave way, but Mournath caught it, and stayed until last to hold the rope for the others, before swinging across the chasm and climbing up to the landing in the end. The whole affair took on a sense of urgency when a swarm of tiny, but carnivorous snails crawled up the landing and ate Orvis, rapidly reducing him to a skeleton. The others heaped some gear into the wheelbarrow and rushed through the golden door. Mournath took another glance at the elf, and realized the skeleton was wearing human-skin leather armor and carrying a steel-hard glass sword. He declined to collect the armor, but did take the glass sword, along with a handful of ancient moon-shaped coins.


"I was the one who got Blorgamorg to listen to us! The others don't even know HOW to beg properly! Begging is my JOB, so of COURSE I'm good at it!"

Through the golden door, the group arrived in a huge natural cavern, lit by growths of glowing amber stone. There was a giant altar in the center of the room, and a slime-coated tunnel on the far side leading out. A shadow filled the room as a giant snail with gemstone eyes slithered down from the ceiling. In a booming voice, it declared "Hello little ones, Blorgamorg has use for you!" Brian dropped to his knees and began groveling, Phil nonchalantly backed away, and Spanakopita ran to the edge of the cave in a panic.

Greta politely beseeched Blorgamorg for help, and the great snail explained that his own former apprentice had returned to the island and built an accursed sanctum further below. He wanted the travelers to force out the wizard, and Greta agreed on behalf of the group. The snail patron offered them extra help, in the form of four more shipwreck survivors, who were spit out of the floor by a wave. These were Todd's replacement characters, Schitts the blacksmith, Chase the halfling moneylender, Dennis the weaver, and Dodge the caravan guard.

Jack investigated the slime-coated tunnel and saw that it was actually a chute dropping almost straight downward. Spanakopita climbed into the wheelbarrow with the gear and told the others to give it a push. The barrow raced down the greasy shaft and came to an immediate halt when the front wheel got snapped into a bear trap. Spanakopita went flying, landed face-first on some rocks, and died. Mournath went next, avoided getting speared on the wheelbarrow handle, and then called down to the others that it was safe to descend.


"I knew the wheelbarrow wasn't safe, but Spanakopita wouldn't LISTEN to me! I didn't even get a chance to SAY anything before she died! Anyway, this is where I found the wonderful medallion that made everything make SENSE for a change. The others say the amulet CHANGED me, but they're just JEALOUS because I found the BEST treasure ever!"

At the bottom of the chute, the travelers found themselves on a beach at the foot of the stairs. The water to either side of the staircase faintly glowed, and there were two burning braziers flanking a door directly across from the foot of the stairs. They saw a large, turtle-like creature washed up on the shore. Sally went to investigate, with Schitts following close behind. As she got close, a tapeworm leapt from the turtle's flank and dove down Sally's throat, desiccating her and killing her instantly. Seven more worms danced like cobras from the side of the turtle, so Schitts backed away. Greta helped herself to some of Sally's and Spanakopita's supplies.

The group saw two statues on either side of the staircase, one a statue of a man, the other a statue of a lion, both wearing medallions. Brian the wizard's apprentice recognized the man as a god of chaos and the lion as a god of laws and kings. Persimmon's body floated near the statue of the man. Greta waded out to the statue of the man and circled it, seeing that he held a dagger hidden behind his back, then took the medallion. She realized immediately that all her problems were somebody else's fault, and everyone else in the group was to blame for her current situation. ("See? It's like I TOLD you! The medallion knows! Why can't you ever LISTEN to me?") Dodge waded out to the statue of the lion and took its medallion, but then Chase took it from him and put it on. He immediately felt incredibly guilty for stealing from his friend. Meanwhile Kyle and Mournath freed the wheelbarrow and collected the bear trap.


"I want to be rewarded! I DESERVE a reward!"

The travelers passed through the door at the foot of the stairs and arrived in a rough stone chamber, with a stone dodecahedron hanging from the ceiling, swaying slightly in the breeze. Immediately under the dodecahedron was a stone altar with a white ceramic pitcher, with writing that promised "Drink if you would be rewarded for patient consideration." Kyle and Mournath assumed the hanging stone would fall and crush anyone approaching the pitcher, but Greta, Brian, Dennis, and Dodge all drank water from the pitcher. As he drank, Brian studied the geometric stone overhead, and realized that the runes carved into it were names of gods of balance.

The continued into a damp-smelling room full of glowing, twitching human-sized green ovals. Each oval was connected by a strand of slime to a central nodule, which sat atop a tall stone pillar. Schitts wriggled up the pillar and saw a dark sphere inside the green nodule. Using his blacksmithing tongs, be pulled the sphere out. As he removed it, the ovular shapes dimmed and went still. Schitts recognized that whatever this metal was, it was heavier than lead, and was carved into the shape of an eyeball with a gemstone iris.

The wanderers were eager to leave that room, but the next one they entered had a giant stone coffin, and the walls were indented with niches, where skeletons stood guard. They backed out, and found a staircase going deeper into the island sanctum. Schitts started leading the group down a hall at the bottom of the stairs, but the floor collapsed under him, and under brave Brian, who had rushed forward to try to save him. ("I wanted to save him, too! Brian pushed me out of the way! He didn't even LET me try to help!") They fell 30 feet into shallow water and both died on impact. The makeshift lantern Brian had been carrying lit the scene of carnage at the bottom of the pit. ("Plus Brian broke our lamp! What are we going to DO without a lamp, Brian?") Inspecting through the open trapdoor, they saw a third body - the skeleton of a dwarf holding a metal box. Kyle and Mournath used a chain to lower Chase down to the water. He retrieved the lockbox and was pulled back up. Mournath broke the rusted box open with his hammer and found dozens of silver coins, and a lead coin good for a free drink at one of the bars in Xothma-Ghul. The group edged their way around the trap door, and took another staircase at the end of the hall.


"If you look at it from their perspective ... then we're the ones in the wrong ... which means I'm wrong ... which means their perspective is STUPID! We should KILL them for being stupid!"

The travelers entered a slime-coated chamber where they walked in on a half-dozen slug-men eating fungus from a clay pot. The monsters dropped their mean and hastily started gathering their spears. Greta, Dennis, and Dodge found themselves afflicted with the Curse of Thoughtful Deliberation, which tempted them to consider the situation from the slug creatures' point of view. In practice, this went more like them considering considering the slug-men's point of view, then deciding to kill them anyway. Kyle and Mournath once again did most of the killing, and afterward, everyone took a shield, spear, and copper chaos-symbol necklace from the dead soldiers.

The group also inspected the clay pot, which was full of colorful mushrooms. Chase ate one, his eyes turned red, and he became able to see in the dark. Greta was jealous of Chase, ("I was NOT! Chase was jealous of ME!") ate a mushroom, and experienced the same effect. Dennis ate a mushroom that tasted foul, and caused four small mushrooms to grow out of the top of his head. He wasn't very happy with that result, so he ate another. The mushrooms on his head turned black and withered, and he began uncontrollably vomiting green sludge until he died. ("Dennis was jealous TOO! See! EVERYONE'S jealous of me!") The clay pot went into the wheelbarrow with the rest of their treasure, and the group moved on.

Entering another hall, the group found a very new-looking wooden door, along with another set of stairs leader further down. Greta peeked through the keyhole and saw a bedroom lit by candlelight. Using the dagger she stole from Spanakopita, ("I didn't steal it! Spanakopita GAVE it to me! After she died!") Greta managed to pick the lock, and the door opened silently. The air in the bedroom was clammy and damp. It was well-appointed, with fine bedsheets, tapestries hung from the walls, and a large wardrobe to match the four-poster bed. The group concluded that this must be the wayward apprentice's room. Greta opened the wardrobe and stole several fancy silk robes and bottles of perfume. ("I DIDN'T steal them! The apprentice GAVE them to me! She WANTED me to take them!") Chase found a lockbox and tried out Greta's lockpicking trick, and managed to prise it open. He found rubies, a clay vial with a potion, and a receipt for some paintings Xothma-Ghul's favorite artist, Spargo Excellerando. Mournath, Kyle, and Dodge searched the room for hidden exits, checking behind every tapestry, and eventually found a door mechanism in the wardrobe.

The room on the far side of the wardrobe was lit by a silver candelabra. This was a smaller, more utilitarian space, with a purple book on a small wooden table. Chase started flipping through the book, and as he did, a black crayfish with glowing purple runes emerged from the book's shadow and began attacking him. Mournath and Kyle assailed it with spears ("THEY'RE the ones who stole those spears from the slug-men! THEY'RE the thieves!") and Greta heroically saved the day by shutting the book and tossing it into the wheelbarrow, along with the silver candelabra. The group agreed their next move should be down the stairs to confront the apprentice.


"I killed a demon, all Todd's characters got killed again, and the slug-men wouldn't LISTEN to me! You NEVER listen to me!"

At the bottom of the stairs, the travelers entered a room filled waist-deep with brackish water. They saw another stone altar, this one glowing with red runes, and just visible at the far side of the room was a doorway out, with fresh breeze blowing in. After Blorgamorg's entrance, Kyle and Mournath immediately looked up at the ceiling, where they saw a woman with the lower body of a slug, clining to the ceiling and wielding a multi-colored sword. They immediately assailed her with spears. She quickly lost blood from her injuries, then passed out unconscious, falling into the water below, where she was speared to death.

Simultaneously, more slug-men burst up from the water and brandished spears at the party, and a giant white woolly demon slug appeared from behind the altar. The slug-men threw spears into Chase and Dodge, killing them. Greta grabbed a flask of oil from the wheelbarrow, poured it onto the water, and set it alight, holding the demon slug at bay. Mournath took the bottles of perfume that Greta stole from the wardrobe and threw them into the fire, where they exploded and drove the demon back to some other realm. ("No! He stole them from ME!") Greta brandished her talisman and tried to turn or command the slug-men, but wasn't able to compel them. Kyle and Mournath pulled the spears out of Dodge and Chase's corpses and used them to finish off the remaining slug-men. ("Maybe I WAS in command of the slug-men! Maybe I WANTED them to keep attacking the dwarves!")

Searching the fallen apprentice's body, Kyle recovered her multi-hued metal sword, and Mournath found some jewelry which he put in the wheelbarrow. They floated the barrow across the flooded room and through the door on the far side. They found three paintings leaning against the wall. One had been burnt badly, and another showed a sunny field before a distant village. Mournath touched the painting, and both he and the wheelbarrow disappeared, magically transported to the outskirts of Xothma-Ghul, a location almost identical to the painting. Kyle, feeling worried for his brother, touched the painting and disappeared as well. Greta felt worried about the treasure ("They're trying to STEAL from me! EVERYONE'S always stealing from me!") and followed close behind.

Additional Actual Plays

In my first post about other bloggers' actual play reports, I asked my readers to nominate any play reports they knew about that I might have missed. I also put up the call on Google+ and MeWe. I've also kept my eyes open for people talking about play reports, and I've watched for new blogs posting play reports. This exercise also jogged my memory about a few that I knew about but had forgotten. The links below are in the order I received, found, or remembered them.
 
 
FM Geist recommended the sex, drug, and ultraviolence-filled urban adventures over at Last Gasp.
 

 
 
Jack Shear recommended the Blades in the Dark play reports over at Fictive Fantasies. That link should take you to a campaign overview page, where you can first find links to all the worldbuilding done in support of the campaigns, and then links to play reports from six separate campaigns set in the same world.
 
 
David Wilke recommended the session reports over on his own Anxiety Wizard blog. It looks like he's sent his players through a variety of LotFP adventures, including World of the Lost, Deep Carbon Observatory, and Red and Pleasant Land.
 
 
Michael Bacon suggested the play reports collected in the Thursdays in Thracia campaign over on the Bad Wrong Fun blog. Unsurprisingly, this is a campaign exploring Jenelle Jaquays' Caverns of Thracia megadungeon, apparently using Necrotic Gnomes' B/X Essentials rulebooks at the table.
 

   
 
Doug M recommended his own Smouldering Wizard play reports. That link goes to a master list of campaigns, each with their own set of reports: exploring the Endless Tunnels of Elandin using Holmes' Basic, visiting Larm using Labyrinth Lord, a campaign in the Ruined Hamlet of Blixter using Mutant Future, and OD&D campaign on a Quest for the Dwarven Mine, and another OD&D campaign collecting the Chronicles of Nolenor, a one-shot Witches of the Dark Moon game using Swords & Wizardry, and another Swords & Wizardry game set in Ravendale.
 

   
   
Andreas Habicher recommended Papier und Spiele, where he led a four-part play-by-poll game exploring The Spider Pit, using Maze Rats rules. Unfortunately, these posts aren't tagged, but Papier und Spiele is a new blog, so these are the only reports on there right now.
 
 
Seeing that play-by-poll campaign reminded me of some other things I'd forgotten before. I mentioned Blog of Holding last time, but I forgot to mention the Mearls campaign widget he has in his sidebar. Hereticwerks also used reader surveys as the basis of their long-running Bujili campaign. In addition, Hereticwerks has a few other actual play reports that I forgot completely when I was writing my first list.
 

 
 
John recommended his own Wandering Gamist play reports for his Adventurer Conqueror King campaign. John's reports put a statistical overview of the session right up front. These have traditional categories like XP and treasure, but also how long he spent playing the session and prepping beforehand, and exactly how much within-game time elapsed inside the dungeon. More traditional narrative summaries, anecdotes, and post-mortem thoughts follow after all this.
 
 
Bryan recommended Olde School Wizardry which ran a Dwimmermount campaign. Of special note is that many sessions in this campaign (which have their own tag!) were run with middle-schoolers as the players.
 
 
Aos has restarted his Metal Earth blog after a bit of a hiatus, and he's posted reports about session 2 and session 3 of a B/X campaign set on Mars. Currently these aren't tagged. If you like his art, you can also check out his Cosmic Tales comic. Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque also has a few reports of from his time playing in Aos' Mars campaign.
 

 
 
The impending demise of Google+ has encouraged people to resume blogging after a hiatus, post more on their blogs, and even start new blogs. For the record, I think all this is great, but it probably can't take the place of a centralized location for aggregating commentary on blog posts, gaming discussion, and friendly non-gaming conversations among the small number of people who have gaming blogs and the much, much larger number of people who read them. That said, you can find a list of OSR blogs here, a list of non-OSR gaming blogs here, and Ramanan S of Save vs Total Party Kill has put together a file that you can load into an RSS reader for an instant OSR blog feed. (I don't know who started the OSR one, Jack Shear started the non-OSR list.)
 
Anyway, as a result of all this activity, I noticed or took a second look at some blogs I either didn't know about last time, or didn't realize were posting play reports.
 
 
Weird & Wonderful Worlds ran a Shieldbreaker campaign. He also has a few reports from his time as a player in Throne of Salt's Danscape games.
 
 
I don't know where I first saw everyone on this list, but I do know where I first saw Underground Adventures. Wizard Lizard was posting play reports directly into MeWe's Into the Odd community, and I suggested he should start a blog, and he did. He's using Into the Odd's rules to run his players through the Barrowmaze.
   

 
 
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers has an old Elves & Espers campaign that seems to be set in a fantasy Victorian city using Savage Worlds rules. You also have to love anyone who uses old Lego mini-figures both as miniatures and as the photo for the blog header.
 
 
Michael (who recommended "Thursday with Thracia") didn't recommend his own blog, Buildings are People, but I did notice that he's running a Formalhaut campaign using Gabor Lux's Echoes from Formalhaut zine.
 

 
 
I noticed that Fallen Empires is running a campaign that visited the Maze of the Blue Medusa and the Gardens of Ynn. (Ynn seems to be a pretty popular destination these days!) Isaak is using a list-of-accomplishments format similar to the Wandering Gamist. I'll confess it can be a little difficult for me to tell what actually happened in most of these sessions.
 
Carapace King has a couple campaigns worth of reports. Dikes Fall Everyone Dies takes place in a horrible, Hieronymus Bosch-ian Holland, while his new Ben-Dagra campaign sounds reminiscent of Yoon-Suin.
 
 
How on earth did I forget Judge James' Living 4 Crits blog? He doesn't tag his posts, but almost the entire blog is play reports, most of them using Dungeon Crawl Classics. James also does a great job linking to the previous reports in each series at the beginning of each post and to reports from other campaigns at the end of each one.
 
 
I also remembered that Superhero Necromancer a couple of campaigns in his own Rainy City setting. The Rainy City exists at the end of the world, where it's always raining because the wall separating the Prime Material Plane from the Elemental Plane of Water has sprung a leak, and so the world is slowly flooding. Literally every spell, monster, and magic item that exists is unique, and in the first campaign, the players are wizard thieves trying to get the good stuff while the getting's good. In the second campaign, the players are all parliamentarians in some kind of wizard's parliament.
 
 
Dennis Laffey from What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse both runs his own games and blogs about being a player. He's running his own campaign based on Ars Ludi's West Marches ideal. He's also played for several years in another GM's Vaults of Ur campaign (where he plays a Sleestak, no less!)
 
 
In retrospect, it should have been obvious to me why it's mostly Game Masters who post play reports online - it's because it's mostly Game Masters who keep blogs. Chris P is actually a rare counter-example (I think) because as far as I know, he only plays in online games, never runs them, but he does keep a blog where he sometimes talks about it. I've actually played alongside Chris is like three different open-table games; he's a very canny player who, to me, exemplifies what people are talking about when they write paeans to the wily players of yesteryear. In one memorable session, his character wore a treasure chest as a backpack - and eventually revealed that it was a cursed or magically trapped chest, which he opened to unleash the curse on an attacking monster. The chest had some kind of treasure in it which he had never recovered, because it was more valuable to him as a magic beam weapon. Among the play reports, you can also find a link to a lengthy Google Doc that describes his sessions exploring the Colossal Wastes of Zahar.
 
 
Chris Wilson of Journey into the Weird ran a game that ended in a (near) TPK, and wrote about it. So far this is his only play report, there could be more to come.
 
 
Roger suggested his own blog, A Life Full of Adventure. He's mostly been running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but appears to have recently started a 5e game.
 
 
Beloch Shrike is back! You may recall that my previous post started with me being inspired by Beloch posting some play reports. Unfortunately, almost immediately after that, the Papers & Pencils blog went away for awhile because it got hacked. Fortunately, it's back, and Beloch has continued his series of posts looking back at his old Dungeon Moon campaign. He's also written a post-mortem for his just-retired Fuck the King of Space campaign. I find his insights about what worked well and what he would do differently in the future very valuable.
 
 
Nate Treme from Highland Paranormal Society has a couple play reports and player art associated his own In the Light of a Ghost Star campaign.
 

 
 
My friend Peter posted about a game of John Stater's Tales of the Space Princess he ran for his family. So far, I think this is the only play report on his blog, but it sounds like it was fun.
 
 
Finally, and most recently, Kyrinn S Eis found the Dragon's Breakfast blog, which turns out to have play reports for a hundred-session-long nautical campaign set in his own Far Isles setting. It looks like he's also gearing up to start a Classic Traveller campaign, which certainly has enough material to go a hundred more.
 
 
I'm sure there are more blogs out there that host play reports, but I'm willing to call an end to my part in this little experiment. It was fun hearing from so many people about actual plays that they like, and interesting to rediscover parts of my own sidebar that I'd forgotten.
 
I recently had a friend start playing D&D 5e with an apparently terrible GM and she nearly quit the game after a few sessions of torture. I shared some of my favorite 5e play reports with her, some imaginative, weird, artistic games, and the next time I talked to her, she said she was quitting her GM but not quitting the game. She wants to play good D&D more than ever.
 
I'll leave off with a call-to-arms from Ben L of Mazarin's Garden (another one I forgot last time), who wants us all to remember the games we played on Google Plus and Google Hangouts:
 
"For the love of God, if you have a community on G+ for your game, even if that game ended long ago, please export the community so some record will remain of your shared play. So many worlds are about to be extinguished, and along with them the memories recorded in countless session reports, downtime threads, scheming plans, posted maps, ephemera, funeral threads celebrating dead PCs. Don’t let it just disappear into the void."