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July 8, 2023

Star Wars Character: Dita Voss, Sole Survivor of the Numenorean Argosy

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Dita Voss was born and raised in the Numenorean Argosy, a large fleet of ships that moved through the galaxy as a caravan, centred around the ancient behemoth called the Numenor. The Argosy was composed of thousands of ships, ranging in size from single-family yachts to kilometre-long hospital ships and resource barges. They traveled approximately together, though at any time a small portion of their number would be away on trade missions separate from the main body of the fleet. The Argosy was in part a self-contained economic entity, its member ships providing services to and producing goods for each other, but its primary means of external trade was the provision of mechanical and computer services to the myriad small, independent starbases, mining colonies and space stations of the galaxy. The Argosy had accreted slowly over thousands of years, and amongst the crumbling engine rooms and cockpits of its ancient ships the fleet held knowledge and expertise on almost every technical system that had ever been used in the galaxy, as well as starmaps detailing the location and complement of mining stations, gas harvesters, deep space research bases and colonies that had been established so long ago that knowledge of their construction methods, components and sometimes even coordinates had been long lost to the majority of the galaxy’s settled societies. The arrival of the Argosy at one of these legacy structures led to an orgy of trade and renewal, as technicians on the bases seized the opportunity to gain access to old blueprints, fashion spare parts for systems that had been held together by jury-rigged components for generations, and restart auxiliary (or sometimes essential) computer and life support systems that had long since been given up for dead. Sometimes they would pay the Argosy to take one of their young onboard as an apprentice, who would travel the galaxy for a decade training in mechanics or computing or electronics, to return to their home base years later with a deep and enduring knowledge of everything that could go wrong in even the most obscure of systems. Droids that had been shutdown for centuries would be repaired and restarted, their long lost knowledge returned to colonies and mining stations, and data storage systems whose access mechanisms had long since ceased working would be turned over to the Argosy, passed from hand to hand through ever-older ships until somewhere someone found a lovingly-maintained device that could read the lost data and return it to its owners. Sometimes a colony that had regressed to almost stone-age technology would have a memory of the last visit of the Argosy, centuries or millenia earlier, a cave painting or a religious fresco, and its return would be the opportunity for the renewal of a society, the overthrow of tyrants, the start of a new renaissance.

Such was the vital role of the Numenorean Argosy at the Edge of the Empire, until the Empire realized its value and completely eradicated every single living member of its polity.

Everyone, that is, except Dita Voss.

Dita Voss

Dita Voss was planetside when the Empire struck the only home she had ever known, helping an obscure religious order to retrieve data from a servitor droid that had crashed an eon earlier, taking with it precious fragments of their religious knowledge. Above her the Imperial SPIDER Unit tore through the myriad ships of the Argosy, destroying any who opposed it and rooting out every byte of information they could, while she worked quietly and earnestly in the chilly crypt of the ancient order’s long-abandoned hilltop shrine, patching together systems that were so old even the language of their manuals was a barely-remembered legend. In galactic terminology Dita is a slicer, someone who can work with computer systems – programming them, breaking into them, subverting them and hacking them to make them do her bidding. She had been trained for years in the manifold computer networks of the relic sites on the empire’s rim, helping to disable rogue defense systems for their owners, reworking neglected mainframes for a new era of information, and sometimes helping mining communities to establish secure uplinks that were protected from spying by big corporations or imperial agents. But she had never been trained in anything except the rudiments of combat, and so when she emerged from the dusty cold of the underground chambers to witness the remains of her ancestral home tumbling flaming from the sky, there was nothing she could do to help. She could only watch in stunned disbelief as the Empire destroyed what, for slicers and mechanics across the galaxy, was the greatest library of knowledge that had ever existed.

The order hid her in their crypts, and kept her identity and location secret when imperial troops came looking for any survivors of the carnage. Fortunately for Dita, her contracted task had been entirely communicated by word of mouth between herself, her grandmother and the order, and there was no record of her presence on the planet. Her grandmother had died in the first assault, the secret of Dita’s mission dying with her, and so she was able to hide and emerge safe from the destruction of the Argosy. The order gave her a little money, an ancient slugthrower, some stun grenades the imperial agents “misplaced”, and some basic survival gear, and helped her to hide until the SPIDER unit was gone. In exchange she promised them that she would exact her revenge, and somehow recover all the knowledge she could that had been taken from the Argosy.

With just this obligation – this oath of revenge – to sustain her, carrying everything she owned on her back, Dita Voss set out into the world, determined to right a great wrong, and to restore the legacy of the Argosy. Dita is young though, and inexperienced in the ways of the world – she will need a team to join if she is to make her way. Once carefree and lighthearted, she is now burdened with the loss of her family and community, and carries this great tragedy with her. Nonetheless she is young, and she remains cheerful and optimistic in the pursuit of her ordinary daily life. She loves all things technical, and never backs down from a challenge, believing she has never met a computer she could not overcome. Now, though, what was once an aimless and joyous pursuit of technological skill for its own sake has become a finely-honed weapon against the Empire, a mission to find and restore the lost knowledge of the Argosy, and to wreak revenge on everyone who was involved in its destruction. Give her a ship, a team and a chance, and she will change the galaxy!

Illustrator note: The top image is by The UncannyKen on DeviantArt. The second picture is from the Coriolis Last Cyclade book

 

January 28, 2023

Secrets of the Archipelago: The Ritual

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Game planning, game reports, Gaming material | Tags: , |
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The Wrathbreakers have destroyed the deepcult leadership, killing their Demiurge and looting her laboratory. Amongst her documents they have found a set of scrolls that describe a ritual that is likely at the heart of the deepcult’s plans. These documents are a set of scrolls rolled up in an ornate scroll case, in a box with obvious magical paraphernalia – a silver knife, some jars of reagents and powders, bunches of herbs, a set of robes, and a wand of blackened bone. The scrolls appear to have been written relatively recently, by an unknown writer who is probably a scholar of magic and most likely a member of the deepcult – and definitely not a deepfolk.

The scrolls describe in detail a ritual to reopen something called “the Rift”, which can be located in the wall of a huge room called the “Chamber of Remembrance.” The ritual will take some hours, and requires seven specific artifacts of great power, listed as:

  • Fragment of a fallen moon
  • Rib of the first human
  • Eye of a dead god
  • Fragments of a dragon’s egg
  • The ghost of the first human child
  • A fragment of death’s shadow
  • The embers of the first fire

Each artifact is described in detail, along with some ideas about its possible location. It is clear from the description that the Wrathbreakers already possess the Fragment of a fallen moon, eye of a dead god, and the ghost of the first human child. It is also clear that the Rib of the first human is in the possession of the cult, in the Demiurge’s study, and that the fragment of death’s shadow is under Kyansei’s lands. The only two remaining artifacts to be gathered are the fragments of a dragon’s egg (held by the dragon that was born from that egg, in Caen) and the Embers of the First Fire, which are currently being searched for in the Valley of Gon.

The writer indicates that this ritual needs to take place at a specified time that corresponds with the millennial re-alignment of the stars known as the Seven Children of Rage. The writer believes that there is perhaps a 1-3 month time period in which their alignment will be approximately good enough for the ritual to work. The writer speculates that the ritual could be conducted at any other time but would require significantly more power than the deep cult currently has available, and to summon that power would require “a wasteful expenditure of a large portion of those who will eventually become our slaves.”

The writer also seems to hint that this ritual is a re-engineering of a ritual first conducted 1000 years earlier which attempted to fully seal “the Rift” closed, but which failed because one of the artifacts was a fake. The writer hypothesizes that the egg was a fake, and that whoever was responsible for providing the egg in the ritual had swapped it for a fake and stolen the real one. Why they did this is not known, but ascribed to ordinary human greed by the writer.

The writer describes the consequences of this treachery: the original ritual failed, unleashed a huge blast of evil magic, and did not completely seal the gate. The writer believes that this ritual was rushed, probably because the humans who conducted it were under attack from the guardians of the seals, and so had no time to abort the ritual and recover the egg – or maybe didn’t even realize the dragon egg had been swapped with a fake until the ritual was supposed to be completed. The writer postulates that when the ritual failed and unleashed its huge blast of dark magic, it killed or severely damaged the guardians of the seven seals, and scattered them across the underworld of the Archipelago. The locations where those guardians appeared probably correspond in some way with the alignment of the seven new stars, The Seven Children of Rage, which appeared in the sky at that time.

The writer does not know what the seven guardians were, but based on what they know about the first artifact they found – the rib of the first human – they postulate that the seals were stolen by humans from “the treasure chambers of their slave masters”, though how this was done the writer cannot say. Each seal had a guardian, and those guardians chased the humans to recover the seals, coming through “the Rift” and catching them during the ritual. The humans must have had to fight the guardians while continuing the ritual to seal “the Rift”. The writer notes that he/she found the Rib of the first Human in the chamber of Remembrance, and had to fight its guardian. This guardian is described as a crazed human with supernatural powers, wielding a powerful spear it calls the “spear of destiny.” The human bled from its hands and feet and could perform various feats of magic, but was ultimately too weak to be a god or a full power from the world beyond “the Rift”, so the writer assumes that the blast of magic power unleashed in the ritual, plus 1000 years trapped in the Chamber of Remembrance, both weakened the guardian and drove it crazy. It is not clear if every guardian survived this ritual.

The writer further postulates that the dragon, being originally a creature from beyond “the Rift”, must need “the Rift” to stay open in order to survive, and will die if “the Rift” is closed. The writer also speculates that fully opening “the Rift” will have significant consequences for the deepfolk, and these consequences should in no way be communicated to the deepfolk. “After all,” the document finishes, “When we are elevated to a place of status alongside our former masters from beyond the Rift, will we not need slaves of our own?”

 

January 26, 2023

Secrets of the Archipelago: Letter to the Demiurge

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The Wrathbreakers have destroyed the deep cult, killing its leader, a middle-aged woman with potent deep magic powers who was referred to by her followers as the Demiurge. In her study they found a very recent letter sent to her by one of her field agents, which contains important information about the Dragon of Caen and the location of one of the as yet undiscovered relics, the dragon’s egg.

Demiurge,
 
I have made contact with the beast. It is old and tired, barely bothering to stir from its lair. Its size is fantastic, and it must once have been mighty, but now it were as if it were afflicted by some dementia or failure of spirit. Nonetheless, to fight it even in its senescence is beyond the capacity of our forces on the island.
 
It is convinced that the Rift weakens it, and that it will die if it is not closed. Based on my research here I believe the opposite to be true – if we close the Rift the beast will inevitably fade. In its delirium and weakness it misses the truth.
 
I believe I can convince it to allow us to take a fragment of egg, on the promise of using it to close the Rift. I await your authorization.
 
 
Shileel
Caen
 
 
 
 

January 26, 2023

Secrets of the Archipelago: The Elven Documents

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The Wrathbreakers have destroyed the deep cult with a final battle in its lair, and uncovered some documents that can finally tell them what the deep cult was seeking. The first of these are the elven documents that were captured from Regalt’s daughter by deepfolk raiders. The wrathbreakers first stumbled on hints of this story in session 4, when they were attacked by Regald’s daughter’s animated corpse.

The elven documents

These are clearly copies of an original set of documents, with the copies laid out on dwarven stone paper with a few elven notes. They are mad scribbles, pictures and diagrams, transcribed as carefully as possible to reflect the original, with a short foreword by an elven scholar from Asboran called Inxult, who is known to have disappeared in the Middlemarch about 400 years ago. They are written as transcriptions of a dream message, but the message is garbled and confused. It has three distinct voices, and appears to have been dreamed over many nights.

Voice 1: A group of people who are desperate and need help

Voice 2: A group of people who are happy and comfortable, living easy and satisfying lives

Voice 3: A group of people consumed with rage and hatred, who seek revenge and destruction for a reason they do not clearly understand.

Foreword

I had long suspected that there was a reason the elves lost their holdings in Leminog, and was never satisfied by the explanation that the land was abandoned because it was too hard to protect our holdings during the war between deepfolk and humans. In the annals of old scholars during a routine search I noticed that one scholar, Avelst, went missing in Leminog at around the time of the concession of Leminog, but in an addendum in a particular book I found reference to a tower that he had written letters from. Such an obscure link! But I thought there might be something to it, and so I visited here with a small team of human guards and porters. The local humans, a superstitious group, warned against visiting it, telling me it was haunted by an ancient elven ghost, but I refused to believe them. Foolish me! For it is haunted by an elven ghost, and when I found him, buried in his tree, I discovered that the spirit of Avelst himself was bound up in this tree. I bonded with his spirit but could learn little, except that he had dreams of despair and ruin, and finally flung himself from this tower to die in the garden. A tree grew around him but it is corrupt and evil, and I do not understand how his soul can be so trapped within it. I am no Astrologer and so I cannot say, but this whole place makes me uneasy, and I understand why the human locals avoid it. Perhaps this is why the elves abandoned this place? But Avelst was never himself buried, so perhaps he remained after the other elves left, and killed himself? There is much mystery here in this dank, unwelcoming forest – no wonder the elves abandoned this unyielding place.

In Avelst’s chambers I found his documents, a collection of hand-scrawled documents that present a fine testimony to the depth of his madness. It is some hundreds of years since he wrote them and even fine elvish paper has begun to decay, so I conducted a careful and painstaking documentation of them, which has taken me some months. I copied them as faithfully as I could, and then reorganized them into what I think is the correct temporal organization. They are written in the register of a report of a dream message, but have none of the clarity of a dream message, and seem to come from three different voices, which I label The Desperate, The Complacent, and The Vengeful. They are not directly linked temporally, with the story of the desperate coming in between that of the Complacent and the Vengeful, I think.

No doubt serious scholars would laugh at my findings, but I cannot help feel there is some historical fact buried in these crazed visions. I aim now to travel to the elven scholars in the southern Hadun borders, to present these documents to scholars there for further analysis. Unfortunately, the work of transcription has taken longer than expected, and I have business with family in Asboran that I cannot delay. I will return overland to Asboran for the winter, and when the spring storms pass I will take ship to Estona, and from there travel through the Middlemarch to the great forest. It is a long journey, and disrupted by timing and family affairs, but Avelst’s dreams have waited nearly half a millennium to be discovered, they can wait a year longer.

Signed

Inxult, this year 531 of the Human Calendar

Voice 1: The desperate

Images of a life of slavery and torture in a dusty, furnace-hot land where they are used brutally and mistreated constantly. They are used for labour, sometimes taken as food, sometimes used for medical experiments, sometimes forced into horrible union with evil beasts that create tortured children. No one ever escapes slavery except by death, and no one ever has any hope. Their captors are never seen clearly, but envisioned by the dreamer as creatures of shadow, flame and terror.

Eventually the slaves escape, there are visions of a ragged column fleeing across hot dusty plains, pursuit and eventually escape. They find themselves in cool dark and prepare to be permanently free. There is chanting, magic, many people busy in preparation, and then a scene of a great battle. Here the number 7 appears a lot: 7 treasures they need and stole, 7 great evil monsters that they have to fight, a single betrayal, a sense of something lost, then 7 flashes of light and a sense of failure. Here there is a picture of 7 stars, very clearly placed in the sky in a perfect depiction of the 7 Children of Rage.

Voice 2: The complacent

This is shorter, visions of people living happily in darkness and luxury, mining and digging and living peacefully with all. Sometimes they go out under the stars to enjoy the open air away from the sunshine. There is a sense of distant strangers who they know and are never troubled by, just happy days in darkness and starlight.

There is a vision of a horde of desperate, hungry, dirty, tired, almost naked people, bronze-skinned and alien, emerging unexpected in a great hall underground. A sense of them coming from nowhere, of upheaval and confusion. But peaceful exchange. They help the strangers.

Then there is suddenly a great battle, an explosion of magic, a wave of pain and chaos, and they are lost.

Voice 3: The vengeful

This is the shortest. There is a vision of a sudden explosion of darkness and rage, and suddenly a horde of people who are angry, and a strong sense of self-hatred and shame at who they were. There is rage at a group of bronze-skinned strangers, and terrible scenes of hunting them through the dark halls of their home, slaying them and killing them and eating them in paroxysms of brutal joy. There is also hatred of the ground above, realization that some of them are not the same, a vision of a line where the magic explosion ended, and missions aboveground to kill those who were not touched by it. There is constant rage, a desire for revenge, and a sense of a spiritually evil place they desire to ascend/descend to.

 

June 5, 2022

Secrets of the Archipelago: The Poison Eye clan’s letter

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GM note

Square brackets are editorial additions to explain things that might not make sense to the players or the PCs, or to clarify details about the way that deepfolk write.

Ritualistic declarations of rage or honour are presented in round brackets. In the original letter these appear to have been written in a different colour, possibly due to having been carefully written using blood.

The letter

[Date]: 79th day of the year 1012

Wrathchild!

Vengeance until the sands of time lay waste to all of existence!

We have learnt that our kinfolk beneath the Great Island have made an obscene connection with the beasts who walk beneath the sun (may they be cursed to eternity). They have foolishly revealed the secrets of our magic to the beasts (may their soulless bodies be crushed in the depths of the ocean), and now work together on some fool’s errand.

No compact with the beasts (may their cities lie in ruin beneath our wrath) has ever been tried before, and I do not believe it can come to any good end. They are a jinx upon the earth and always have been, for all above and below the line of day [Deepfolk word for the surface of the earth].  We should not work with them; we should smash their bones and scatter them in the earth as we would our own heretics. Nonetheless, our kinfolk on the Great Island work with the beasts (may the marrow of their bones feed the vilest worms of the earth) to some secret end they do not share with us.

Though we cannot know their plan, word has reached us from spies (whose self-sacrifice was valiant and worthy!) that they seek seven ancient items for some purpose. These items:

  • Fragment of a fallen moon [the pictogram reads as a ball that circles the world we live on, but you can make no sense of it] (location unknown)
  • Rib of the first of the beasts (our kinfolk have this already)
  • Eye of a dead god
  • Fragments of a dragon egg (this must be on Kaen where the lizard rules!)
  • The ghost of the first beastchild (may all their foul progeny be born with open fists) (location unknown)
  • A fragment of death’s shadow (location unknown)
  • The embers of the beasts’ first fire (may they all perish in fire!) (it is rumoured they seek this in Gon)

Does not the third of these artifacts sound familiar to you? Is it not what our ancestors (may their souls rest forever in a world yet untainted by the beasts) uncovered and buried again in the Small Sea. If we have this thing then we can stand between our kinfolk on the Great Island and their plans! Our spies learnt that whatever this secret plan is, it hinges on a deadline connected to the circling of the stars, and in particular the Seven Children of Rage, and if they do not obtain the artifacts within the next year they will be forced to wait 1000 years for the next alignment of the Children of Rage. So it is that, should we obtain this artifact soon, they will be forced to reveal their plans to us, and welcome us into their conspiracy.

So! I command you to dig up this Eye that has been buried, being cautious of its powers and risks, and bring it back to me. Take a small but powerful force to guard the camp, lest any beasts (may their soulless bodies never find ease) stumble upon you. Our lives here have been secret from the beasts for generations (may they know no more generations after this, filthy wretches!), and though this mission is pressing, I do not wish our presence under this land to become known to them, so be merciless in your defense of our secrets.

Make haste, and secure this thing before our kinfolk and their beast allies (rot in the earth, oh filth!) learn of its location.

Do not fail me, Wrathchild!

[Marked with a seal in blood, the icon of the Poison Eye clan]

 

December 15, 2021

Secrets of the Archipelago: Five Hideous Artifacts

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Game planning, game reports, Gaming material, Horror, Infernal adventures | Tags: |
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The Ur-bone

Description: A fragment of bone from an unknown creature, likely human but possibly not. Greyed and mildewy, with a rotten smell. Anyone who touches it will immediately know it is vile.

Effect: When used as a wand or focus for deep magic, increases the range and power of spells that animate or activate the dead, enabling more powerful creatures to be animated. Potentially very dangerous in the hands of a seasoned necromancer.

Age: Perhaps 100 – 200 years old. Probably originally enchanted by a deepfolk necromancer but lost in internecine conflict.

Location: Somewhere in the ruins of a battlefield in the southern spine mountains

The Dreamer

Description: Part of an elf, that was captured when he or she was dreaming under the open sky. Most accounts state that it was an eye, but some say it is a blood-soaked lock of hair, others the whole scalp, some the lower jaw bone (pried out of course). Whatever part it was must have been sufficiently easy to remove that it could be taken whole while the elf was still dreaming. A ritual probably surrounded the extraction. Some say it is preserved in a briny fluid, with extravagant rumours suggesting it is the tears from the other eye. Others say it is dried. Obviously this is irrelevant if it is just hair. The most extreme theory is that it is a head shrunk using a special technique known to a few clans of deepfolk in the far north. Regardless of the particular preservation technology, the whole thing is said to exude a powerful aura of magic and also a repulsive physical aroma.

Effect: The wielder is said to never need to sleep, and also to be immune to all forms of magical compulsion or domination. Obviously this latter effect is very valuable to a deepfolk leader (so is the former, upon reflection). When the wielder does sleep they will suffer terrible dreams, but in the hands of a capable deep magic user it is also said to enable the wielder to intercept elven dream-messages.

Age: >500 years. It is said to have been prepared using lost arts from a northern tribe that was wiped out in some underdark conflict.

Location: A tower in Asboran, where the elves guard it jealously, for obvious reasons.

The sword of the Feybane

Description: A non-descript steel sword, with a hilt of plain leather wrapped in finest spider silk. The blade, though dull and plain-looking, is well-made and sparkles under the light of the sun-shard. It is said to have been forged with threads of spider-silk from a mighty fey beast, somehow connected to a species of fey known as redcaps. How this silk was acquired and its magical properties harvested is unknown, though it is not believed to be an achievement of deepfolk.

Effect: The sword is powerful against all forms of fey, who recoil from its presence and are badly harmed by its touch. It is not said to have any special effect on deepfolk, though elves are said to be made queasy in its presence. Some say it can also harm elves, and that the deepfolk sought it for some time for this reason.

Age: At least 200 years but probably much older. A weapon as non-descript as this is extremely difficult to date, but a character engraved on the metal hilt (below the leather binding) was described by a swordsmith 200 years ago, and is said to no longer be in use.

Location: A collector of militaria in Alpon.

The First Ghost

Description: The first ever ghost of a child who died of neglect. The ghost is said to be stored in a gossamer-thin phylactery, which is likely a mirror, shroud, fine drapery, or other form of ephemeral physical material. Whatever it is, it must be of reasonable size, since it holds a ghost, but must also be very finely wrought and delicate, since it holds a ghost. The magic to imprison such a thing is said to be deep magic, but some argue it must be an older and more fundamental magic than that. Deepfolk magic is not so subtle. But given the age of the thing, who knows? It is said to be non-descript (aside from the quality of craftwork) in its normal form, that it shows a faint luminescence or special glow when illuminated only by starlight or candle light, but that its full beauty is only understood when viewed in candlelight while in a state of privation (hunger, thirst, cold or such-like).

Effect: The ghost, when unleashed (somehow) from the captivity of the phylactery, is said to enable deep magic of great power to be wielded to necromantic ends. Perhaps it enables the creation of extremely powerful undead, or armies of the things. The scholars are surprisingly mute on the value of this thing.

Age: Unknown, but it is the first ever ghost of a child, so likely very old.

Location: The reliquary in the shrine of salt in Estona (thankfully).

The Last Seal

Description: A stamp made of bone, probably carved from a human (though again it is uncertain). The stamp is in the form of a strange repeating pattern that is said to reproduce itself on ever finer scales. Scholars are rumoured to have investigated the pattern with magnifying glasses of various powers, and are always able to find the same pattern repeated inside the structure of larger patterns. The seal gives off no aura of magic or evil, possibly because of the strange enfolding nature of the magic in the stamp.

Effect: When an appropriate mixture of wax, human blood, ash and tears is composed and placed on the forehead of a dead human, and the stamp therein impressed, the human is specially marked for deep magic. Animation spells cast on this prepared corpse will be especially powerful. It will have extra strength and resilience, will not decay with time, and cannot be destroyed or damaged by salt magic. It also can be commanded by the person who holds the stamp, just by thought, no matter where it or they are.

Age: Unknown, but at least 220 years ago.

Location: Stolen by deepfolk in the sacking of Pentaro 220 years ago, now rumoured to be in the possession of a clan somewhere in the spine mountains.

 

May 2, 2021

Brawn vs Agility in Genesys: An example

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A commenter at a Genesys community group online has made the following comment about my criticisms of the role Brawn plays in the Genesys combat rules:

One rule that stands out to me relates to party composition in combat and I haven’t seen it mentioned here. If an ally is engaged with the target of a ranged attack (magical or mundane) the attack must upgrade the difficulty once and any despair causes the attack to instead strike the ally. This, combined with setback from the cover rules causes allied melee fighters to either risk causing their ranged allies to miss, hit them instead, or, as is most often the case, choose to shoot something else.

This is true, but I think it doesn’t fully encapsulate how much of a difference brawn makes even to situations where we choose party composition. So let’s consider two scenarios involving combatants maximized for combat and melee.

Introducing the combatants

First let’s introduce our melee combatant, Gruumsh the Bastard, pulled out of retirement from the pathfinder epidemiology project[1] to do his duty as an experimental subject in our battlegrounds. Gruumsh has a brawn of 4, all other attributes at 2, 2 skill ranks in melee, 1 rank in ranged, no stealth (who needs that?!), a greatsword, a bow and chainmail armour. He thus has a melee defense of 1, 14 wounds, soak 6, does 8 damage when he hits you, and 7 damage if he decides to shoot you. For the purpose of this experiment (to retain fairness) Gruumsh has been dragged from Pathfinder to the Realms of Terrinoth in a human form.

Ranged (haha) against Gruumsh the Bastard is Elegant Eddie. Elegant Eddie has an agility of 4, all other attributes at 2, 2 skill ranks in ranged, 1 rank in melee, 2 ranks in stealth, a sword, a longbow and chainmail armour. He thus has a defense of 1 when in melee, 12 wounds, soak 4, does 8 damage when he shoots you and 5 damage when he stabs you. Eddie is also a human, though a miserable example of his kind as far as Gruumsh is concerned.

Now let’s try two scenarios.

Scenario 1: Firing into melee

We suppose first that Gruumsh has an ally like Eddie, who is nameless. He is attacking Eddie’s ally, who is like Gruumsh, in melee. We don’t care how this melee turns out in detail, but what we want to investigate is the consequence of Gruumsh being engaged while his nameless ally fires into melee. The specific rules of this state that we upgrade the difficulty of the shot by 1, so let’s put Gruumsh’s ally at short range and have him thus use a single red dice for difficulty. If he rolls a despair then he will hit Gruumsh. There is a 1/12 chance of a despair on the ally’s dice pool, so about an 8% chance he’ll hit Gruumsh. The maximum damage he can do in this situation with a truly ridiculous roll is 15 damage, of which Gruumsh can absorb 6, taking 9. A more realistic roll would see the attack do 11 damage, of which Gruumsh takes 5. So realistically this can happen 3 times before Gruumsh goes down. There is a scenario in which Gruumsh’s ally rolls despairs and triumphs, and thus does a critical on Gruumsh, but the chance of this is very low – my calculations put it at about 1% – and any GM who ruled in the extraordinary case of rolling 2 triumphs and 1 despair that the triumphs and the despair don’t cancel would likely not survive the session.

It’s worth noting in this case that the final probability of missing the enemy is similar with or without the upgrade, so if Gruumsh doesn’t engage this enemy and leaves it to his ally to shoot, the party is not significantly improving the chances of the ally doing damage on the enemy – and what is going to happen if Gruumsh doesn’t engage? Which brings us to scenario 2: Gruumsh and Eddie at range.

Scenario 2: A ranged stand off

Let’s suppose that Elegant Eddie and Gruumsh the bastard face off at medium range. Here the difficulty for Elegant Eddie to hit Gruumsh is two purple dice. Let’s suppose they shoot each other, so Gruumsh is not using his best skill. In this case if Elegant Eddie gets one success against Gruumsh he does 9 points of damage, which is 3 net; if Gruumsh gets one success on Elegant Eddie he does 8 points of damage, which is 4 net. For Elegant Eddie to do more damage than Gruumsh in this ranged stand off he needs 2 more successes than Gruumsh! Now each ability die is equivalent on average to 0.625 successes, and each skill die 0.83 successes, so this deficit is the equivalent of Elegant Eddie having two less ability dice and one less skill die – so basically the equivalent of Gruumsh’s agility and skill, but for the slightly elevated chance of a critical[2]. Also note that if they’re dealing approximately the same damage to each other after soak, Gruumsh will kill Elegant Eddie first, because Gruumsh has more wounds. So unless Elegant Eddie gets lucky with criticals there is a chance that he will lose this battle even though he is fighting it with his best ability and Gruumsh the bastard is not.

Now let’s suppose that instead of shooting Gruumsh decides to charge Elegant Eddie. He needs to close from meidum range to engaged, which will take him two manoeuvres: one from medium to short, one from short to engaged. This means that he can spend two strain and gets one attack against Elegant Eddie. Note that even though Elegant Eddie has better agility he doesn’t have better initiative chances, so it’s possible that he’ll never get a chance to shoot Gruumsh, but just in case, let’s assume he does. The maximum damage he can do is 16, of which Gruumsh will take 10, so Gruumsh is guaranteed to reach melee this round. There is a small chance that Elegant Eddie will get a critical, in which case there are a couple of criticals he can roll up (11-20, 41-45, 71-75, 81-85, and 96 – 105 if we are going to be generous to Eddie) that could stop Gruumsh from closing range. My estimation of probabilities puts the chance of this chain of events happening at less than 3%. So there is a 97% chance that Gruumsh is going to close range and get an attack in one round.

The maximum damage Gruumsh can do is the same as Elegant Eddie: 16. But Elegant Eddie has 4 soak and 12 wounds, so Gruumsh can knock him out in one round. The chance of this is low obviously, but note that the minimum damage Gruumsh can do on a successful hit is 9, which translates to 5 for Elegant Eddie, so there is almost zero chance that Elegant Eddie is going to survive two hits – and next round he’s going to need to use his free manoeuvre (assuming he gets one) to get his sword out. Once his sword is out there is actually a chance he’ll do zero damage against Gruumsh even on a successful hit!

A note on cover

Let us suppose that Gruumsh the Bastard wins the initiative and sees that Elegant Eddie has a ranged weapon. Suppose that there is some cover at short range that gives him two defense. He could use his free manoeuvre to get there, dive into cover, then next turn use another free manoeuvre to close to engaged, thus saving two strain. Is this worth it? Each point of defense has a 1/3 chance of reducing Elegant Eddie’s dice pool result by one success, so the two dice in total could reduce the dice pool by two successes at most, some of the time. But Gruumsh the Bastard has two extra points of soak than Elegant Eddie, so this cover is less effective than his brawn advantage in protecting him. The rule book says that two cover dice is equivalent to a trench or blockhouse. Gruumsh’s brawn advantage is better than putting him in a pillbox! If Gruumsh opts to run to cover he would be offering his opponent a chance at a shot at reduced difficulty, with almost no benefit, even if that cover were a blockhouse! Unless Gruumsh is already down to his last two strain, the simple fact is that there is no benefit to him in pausing – he should just rush to melee. Note that if the cover were at medium range and the battle started at long range, he would probably be better off waiting for Elegant Eddie to shoot, rather than running to cover, because the benefit to him of gaining the two cover dice does not out weigh the benefit to Elegant Eddie of the range improvement, given his brawn. He is better off just pausing his run, standing at long range, waiting for Elegant Eddie to shoot him, and then closing to cover. And if Elegant Eddie uses his free manoeuvre to maintain the range so that they have to turn this into a shooting match, Gruumsh’s brawn will neutralize Eddie’s extra skill anyway!

Conclusion

Truly Gruumsh is a bastard. His brawn acts as a dampener on ranged attacks, so that PCs who have chosen to maximize this skill are effectively no better at it than Gruumsh himself (and Gruumsh obviously disdains such petty strategies). Although it is true that firing into a combat in which Gruumsh is engaged slightly increases the risk of harm to him, this risk is small and not worth foregoing Gruumsh’s rush into combat. Worse still, if Gruumsh and a ranged fighter enter an encounter at medium range there is almost no chance that the ranged fighter will survive, even though the engagement has started in a way that should heavily favour the ranged combatant. There is no reason for Gruumsh to seek cover if he wins the initiative, since his brawn effectively acts as if he were hiding in a bunkhouse anyway. None of this is an issue if brawn does not affect soak, and note that things become even more catastrophically difficult for Gruumsh if agility determines combat skill – then Gruumsh would be better off with 3 brawn and 3 agility, and all his calculations would change. Just as in my original experiments in Pathfinder, being able to kill someone quickly outweighs fancy considerations of style, and the doubling up of brawn to both defense and offense means that brawn-focused characters are more dangerous than better-armed opponents even in ranged combat!

Some arguments in the online community where this debate unfolded suggested that Genesys was developed for ranged combat, because it was developed for Star Wars, where blasters are the core weapon. First, this isn’t true – the Star Wars system was developed from Warhammer 3rd Edition, which was developed for a world of Grim Fantasy. Secondly, it’s also wrong. This analysis shows that the system clearly disadvantages ranged fighters heavily.

One small limitation of my analysis here is that I have not considered the cost of completely missing (or the benefits of being completely missed) in scenario 2. This might slightly readjust the balance of risks, but is complicated to calculate for Genesys dice pools. But overall I don’t think that nuance significantly changes the basic finding, which is that brawn serves to neutralize ranged attacks through soak to such a degree that it completely distorts the balance of combat. Brawn should not be applied to soak, or if it is, melee attacks should all be agility based.

fn1: Incidentally, it’s interesting to compare the generally positive response of the Pathfinder community to my rules suggestions there back in 2015, with the negativity and criticism of the Genesys community.

fn2: I am using this approximation because calculating precise probabilities for dice pools in Genesys is tough and I can’t be bothered writing the R code to do it.

 

May 1, 2021

Is Brawn Overpowered in the Genesys System?

Posted by faustusnotes under Game planning, Gaming material, RPG Systems | Tags: |
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Character creation decisions

In the Genesys system brawn determines your wound threshold, the damage your melee weapon does, how much you can carry, whether you can use a cumbersome weapon, your resilience skill, and how much damage you take. Its role in determining wound threshold and soak means it is double-counted in survival: if my brawn is 1 higher than your brawn I start with 1 more wound than you and take 1 less every time someone hits me. Its use in determining weapon damage means it is also double-counted in combat: being used as the base attribute for the skill, it determines how many successes you get (and thus the damage); and this is added on again because brawn also determines the damage of the weapon.

I think this makes brawn overpowered, and it certainly means that no combat-focused character need care about any other attribute. This is particularly true if one uses the rules as written for determining combat difficulties, since the difficulty of hitting someone is not affected by any attribute of theirs. So to be a good fighter you just need a good brawn. Every other character type needs at least two good attributes (e.g. wizards, who usually rely on a different attribute for spell casting vs. strain), but a fighter type can survive with just brawn.

This level of overpowered attribute is also seen in D&D 5th Edition, where dexterity determines how hard you are to hit, your attack bonus, and your damage. Strength becomes irrelevant to a fighter in D&D, and perversely if you really want to a lot of damage you’re better off being a rogue. The role of a fighter in D&D 5 is to give the rogue a chance to flank their opponent (also a terrible rule), not to deal out damage. This is perverse and frustrating, and one of the first changes anyone who plays D&D should make is to revert to strength for weapon damage (at least!)

D&D and Genesys aren’t alone in having over-powered attributes, which is a problem going back to the 1980s and Cyberpunk, which has a suite of attributes of which only two matter. These kinds of rules can be very frustrating because whenever a combat comes up they leave all the other players just watching as a single player does everything for the whole group. Whether it’s realistic or not that a certain attribute entirely determines who is best at something, it’s no fun in a game, and to my mind (and that of most players I’ve ever gamed with) good character design should require that the PC needs two good attributes and can afford to get away with one bad one. It’s not like this in Genesys at the moment.

Brawn and agility in actual combat

Brawn vs Agility

The focus on Brawn in Genesys is also not really realistic, and in particular the soak thing is quite weird. I’ve been kickboxing for years and I know what it’s like to be punched and kicked in the head (and the ribs and the leg and …), and in general one’s ability to resist damage is primarily a quirk of fate. Obviously size determines how much damage you can take (your wound threshold) but most people aren’t especially good at resisting damage. It’s true you see a good boxer taking body shots and wearing them but this isn’t just about brawn – it’s also experience, and most of all timing to turn the body away and tense the muscles at the right time. The classic modern example of this is the much-maligned calf kick, which is becoming very popular in mixed martial arts precisely because no human body seems to be able to ignore it. Whether you absorb that damage or suffer it depends entirely on whether you can shift your leg in time – which is also the entire point of the leg check, which exists to protect your leg (brawn) by absorbing the blow on a bone (using agility to put the bone in the way of the soft part).

The model of the quirky damage-resister in modern fighting is Rodtang (pictured above left), who can actually wear punches, shake his head and keep fighting. He was what the pundits would call an iron chin, but this is highly unusual. Almost all fighters avoid being knocked out by not getting hit, or by rolling with the punches. Obviously much bigger men are harder to knock out for smaller men, but generally, within broad ranges of size, most people can’t resist damage just by being hard. People who think they have this ability are, usually, people who’ve never been really seriously punched.

So, I think Genesys needs to be reformed to reduce the role of Brawn. I think this requires:

  • Make agility the primary attribute for melee attacks
  • Eliminate soak, and either increase armour soak ratings to compensate, or slightly reduce weapon damage
  • Use my reformed combat rules to ensure agility can affect how hard you are to hit, but give brawn some role
  • Introduce some special talents to enable fighters to choose to focus on brawn as a combat component if they want

With this reform, brawn still affects wound threshold and weapon damage, but does not double-count in either. It also means that a good fighter needs to have two strong attributes (at least), and that other types of fighters (who are fast, or use talents) can also hold their own on the battlefield.

Iron chin talent tree

Here I propose a few talents for players who want to develop a PC who fights entirely with brawn. They assume my revised combat rules, which a) assume that skills affect how hard you are to hit and b) ensure that you take a point of strain whenever your armour and soak fully absorbs damage.

  • Hardened fighter (Tier 1): For every rank of hardened fighter, increase your soak by 1
  • Shrug it off (Tier 2): (Requires hardened fighter) Whenever you suffer a rank 1 critical, make a resilience check against your current wounded state. If you succeed, the critical does not affect you
  • Taste for blood (Tier 3): (Requires shrug it off) Once you have been hit once in combat, you no longer suffer strain if your armour absorbs all the damage from future hits
  • Physical bravery (Tier 4): (Requires taste for blood) When you reach your wound threshold, make a resilience check against your current wounded state. If you succeed, you do not go unconscious: keep fighting until someone hits you again (when you need to make this check again)
  • Stalwart (Tier 5): (Requires physical bravery) As shrug it off, but you make the resilience check for any critical injury, against the critical rating, upgraded once if you are already critically injured.

These are just example talents, I’m not sure how unbalancing they might be in combat (and Shrug it off might be underpowered). In my campaign orcs already have the physical bravery talent, and it’s a lot of fun.

Choosing your melee and soak attributes

Another idea that could be considered, though I haven’t put much thought into it, is to allow PCs to choose the attribute they use for soak at the beginning of the campaign. Perhaps the list could be brawn, agility, willpower or presence. Thus you could have a wizard who is hard to hurt because of their sheer force of will, or a bard who refuses to show their pain to an audience.

It’s also possible that weapons could be reformed so different weapons use different attributes, or the brawl, light and heavy melee skills are reformed to use agility, cunning and brawn respectively (in general I think cunning is not a very useful attribute in Genesys). This makes a clear distinction between fast fighters, smart fighters, and tough fighters, something I think most players want to see in a nuanced rule system but which I have shown before often falls apart in practice.

In any case, the key thing here, whatever method one uses, is to reduce the oversized influence of brawn on combat effectiveness, and force fighter characters to be less one dimensional, as well as give other PCs more options and effectiveness in combat. I am not sure if I am going to introduce this reform to my system – at the moment we have only one heavy fighter anyway, and we’ve just gone through a round of rules changes so another set at this point might be pushing the limits of my players’ patience – but I hope the Genesys creators will consider this issue in future iterations of the game.

Addendum: Overpowered stats and role diversity

Some people on the Genesys facebook group have made the point that combat is about more than striking and running, and other characters with other attributes can contribute by doing other things. This is true, but it’s not enough for two reasons. First of all, every critique of every system always gets this response that “role-playing is about creativity, you can find ways to do things that don’t involve violence,” but this is not really fair. First of all, over 30 years of gaming I have never played in any group that didn’t have a heavy focus on violence, and secondly if creativity is so important, why do we have rules at all? We have rules because they’re an important support for our creativity, and the nature of rules changes the way our creativity works. This “oh just be creative in combat” response is always frustrating!

Secondly, however, this response misses an important point about overpowered stats. If one stat is overpowered, then PCs whose primary role depends on that stat will have more choices to be creative in character development than others. Rather than being one-dimensional tanks, brawn-based fighters have more choices to flesh out their PCs. This is because they can excel at their main role with just one attribute, while other PCs need two. Compare, for example, a wizard character that uses presence to cast spells. They will need brawn to stay alive in combat and willpower for their strain threshold. Even if they decide to be fragile, in order to be good at their role they need two attributes. This means that they have less attributes to throw around in secondary character development. It is likely, therefore, that such a PC will choose social skills based on presence – so most such wizards will be leaders or seducers, rather than say kids who ran with gangs (cunning) or acrobats (agility). In contrast, a PC that is primarily a fighter needs only one attribute to be good at what they primarily do, so they have more attributes to throw around. So a fighter-type character can choose to be a leader (presence), a stoic grave-robber whose seen things you wouldn’t believe (willpower), someone who grew up on the streets before they joined the army (cunning) and so on. This PC, rather than being more one-dimensional than those others, will be more flexible! He or she will be able to fight like a monster and be the party’s go-to character for negotiation and perception (for example), while other PCs cannot fit the same diversity of roles because they have sunk all their attributes onto their main role.

A really good example of this problem is the D&D 5E rogue, who is great in combat but also a good archer and has a wide array of super useful crime-style skills. Much of a D&D 5E adventure involves the other PCs waiting for the rogue: they send the rogue ahead to scout the enemy, they set the combat up to ensure the rogue can flank, after the combat they wait for the rogue to check the chest for traps, then the rogue unlocks the chest, and so on. Far from being one-dimensional, the rogue is a more diverse character than any of the others.

So, for a system to fairly encourage role-sharing and ensure that all PCs can contribute to combat, paradoxically, it needs to ensure that the primary fighter characters depend on the same number of attributes to be good at their role as every other PC. Otherwise, rather than only enjoying the combat and being a one-dimensional brawler, they will be the only PC that can enjoy combat and contribute to everything else. And that makes other players bored and frustrated, which is not the point of these games!

 

March 15, 2021

Archipelago Campaign: Unfinished Mysteries at the End of Chapter 1

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Game planning, game reports, Gaming material | Tags: , |
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Where will they look to find these lost secrets?

Chapter 1 of the Archipelago campaign has come to a close, with the PCs liberating themselves from Hugo Tuya’s employment under unfortunate (for him) circumstances and arriving in the city of Estona, where they have established a stronghold. As chapter 2 of this campaign begins they need to choose a name for their new, independent adventuring group, and decide what they want to do next. During their journey across the southern part of Hadun they encountered several mysteries and some potential for future adventure, some of which hints at dark shadows stirring under the mountains. Now they must decide which of those strands of information they will pursue, or if they wish to embark on some other adventure of their own choosing. Estona is a maritime center on the western coast of the Archipelago’s largest island, and offers many opportunities for exploration and adventure if the PCs so choose. Here I will describe some of the mysteries and adventure opportunities they encountered on their journey, and some choices for their group to pursue in chapter 2.

Siladan’s adventuring group

During their adventures the PCs happened upon the history of an adventuring group that hailed from the lands they traveled through. This group appeared to have separated after a catastrophic adventure went wrong, with the survivors settling in their home towns. The three survivors whose names and history the PCs encountered were:

  • Verbere the Flame, a human explorer who returned to the town of Ibara after catastrohpe befell the adventuring group, but who was killed by bandits outside Ibara and whose body and belongings the PCs discovered. They found a letter to him from his old colleague Siladan the Elder, and based on the contents of this letter dug up a buried stash of iron, which they subsequently were forced to hand over to Verbere’s widow
  • Regald, a human warrior living in Ell’s Hamlet, whose daughter they found reanimated outside of Ibara. This girl had been murdered while meeting an elf who appeared to be her lover, and on her body they found a necklace of black stone. Following this necklace, they found Regald, and when they searched his house they found a letter to him from Siladan which suggested he had received some elven documents from their adventuring days, and his daughter had taken these to her elven lover, where she had been ambushed by deepfolk and the documents had been stolen by those deepfolk.
  • Siladan the Elder, a human Astrologer who settled in Estona after the break up of the adventuring group. He appears to have spent some time a few years ago cleaning out old documents and paraphernalia, and sent some of the items he wanted to remove to his former companions. A letter about buried iron was sent to Verbere, while some elven documents and a letter explaining them were sent to Regald. These letters, in their own ways, got Verbere and Regald’s daughter killed. Verbere’s death was likely a coincidence, but Regald’s daughter was killed by deepfolk returning elven documents to the elves. These documents had been previously held by deepfolk, from whom Siladan and his adventurers had stolen them, and it seems likely that the deepfolk somehow discovered they were in the possession of Regald’s daughter and killed her to get them back.

It seems clear that this adventuring group had fought deepfolk many times, had stolen some elven documents from those deepfolk, and the group then dissolved after a catastrophic battle. It also seems likely that the deepfolk desperately wanted those elven documents back, and when the documents were moved from Regald’s house by his daughter the deepfolk somehow became aware of them, and killed her to get them back. What was in the documents? Is it a coincidence that the documents were stolen by an adventuring party active in the same part of Hadun where the deepfolk have become newly active after years of peace? This opens three possible tasks connected to this group:

  1. Meet Siladan and learn the history of his group
  2. Find out more about the elven documents, what they contained and where they were found
  3. Find out how the deepfolk tracked the documents

Which leads us to …

Argalt’s Raiders

The PCs were not the only people looking for Regald. When they were approaching Ell’s Hamlet they were ambushed by a squad of raiders from the Valley of Gon, who they learnt had been sent to Ell’s Hamlet to find Regald. They tracked the raiders to their camp and attacked it, in a vicious battle with the squad leader Rimgalt, who fought with a deepfolk axe.

They learnt that these raiders had been sent from a stronghold in the Valley of Gon by a man named Argalt, a raider chieftain, who had wanted them to find Regald and bring him and any documents in his possession back to the stronghold. They assumed that this must mean that Argalt had learnt of the elven documents some time after Regald’s daughter moved them, and came to Ell’s Hamlet looking for them. The PCs did not travel to the Valley of Gon to interrogate Argalt, so they do not know how he knew about the documents or why his raiders were late to get them, but they have their suspicions. But they could do these things:

  1. Travel to the Valley of Gon to investigate Argalt
  2. Try to learn how he knew about Regalt’s documents and why he wanted them

The fact that Rimgald fought with a deepfolk axe makes them suspect some connection to the deepfolk, and although it is close to blasphemy to think humans would work with deepfolk, Calim suspects it – why else did the deepfolk raiders they met on their journey hold captives to ransom for coin? Which brings us to …

The Skydeath Clan’s Vile Purpose

After Ell’s Hamlet the PCs traveled on to Estala, where they were supposed to receive the first instalment of payment for their escort work from their employer, Hugo Tuya. Unfortunately Estala had been attacked by a contingent of deepfolk from a local clan called the Skydeath clan. These vile beasts had successfully stormed the town at night, killed some guards and taken captives, and had dragged them out of town to a lair nearby where they held them as hostages. The PCs went to help with the hostage negotiations, and learnt that the Skydeath clan were demanding coin for the return of the hostages. This is a very strange demand, because deepfolk cannot trade with humans – any human providing succour or support to deepfolk in any way is a blasphemous concept, it is never done, and there is no record of any such interaction or allegiance between deepfolk and humans, so they simply have no use for coin. Usually deepfolk hostage negotiators demand grain, rice and glass. Why would they demand coin?

The PCs raided the deepfolk camp and slew most of them, freeing the hostages and earning the payment they should have been given for free. They then became involved in the aftermath, tracking down the deepfolk gang and confirming their movements. As part of this they visited a nearby observatory, which the deepfolk had raided, and found:

  • The deepfolk had removed all the observatory’s telescopes
  • The deepfolk had killed everyone working at the observatory and reanimated them
  • The deepfolk had destroyed all sources of knowledge held at the observatory, zealously making sure that nothing that had been researched or learnt there could ever be known by any other humans
  • Someone had managed to erase a poem on a blackboard during the battle, perhaps in desperation to prevent them seeing it. The PCs had been able to reconstruct the poem, though they could not understand what it meant

After the observatory the PCs themselves headed into the mountains on their journey, into a pass called the Middlemarch which they had been promised was safe but which obviously was not. Here they ran into a large force of deepfolk, also from the Skydeath clan, who killed their employer and drove them out of the pass. When they left the pass they realized they had a map from Regald’s documents, which seemed to indicate the location of the deepfolk camp in the Middlemarch. They had been told by reliable sources that the deepfolk in this area had been very quiet for decades, and that the recent attack was highly unusual. Had Siladan’s adventuring group woken something in the mountains? So, the PCs could ask many questions here:

  1. Why did the Skydeath clan attack the town of Estala?
  2. Who are the Skydeath clan? Are they new in the area?
  3. Why did the Skydeath clan want coin?
  4. Why did they destroy the observatory?
  5. What was on the map the PCs found in Regald’s house, what did Regald and Siladan know about the deepfolk in the Middlemarch, and did they wake something up in the mountains at the time that they found, or drew, the map the PCs hold?

To answer these questions might also help the PCs to clear the Middlemarch and drive back the deepfolk raiders, which would clear the way for them to return to the southern part of Hadun, and in particular to Miselea, where they have unfinished business. Which brings us to …

Killing the spider god

On their journey to Miselea, early in chapter 1, the PCs stumbled on a nest of spiders and a loathsome fey called a Redcap. They killed the Spiders and learnt horrible things about the Redcap written in blood poetry by one of its victims. They also freed some humans who had been enslaved by the Redcap, and learnt that they had been accompanying an astrologer who had entered the great forest in search of a god of spiders.

From this the PCs guessed that there are great and powerful gods of animals living in the deep forests of the world, and that the god of the spiders lives in the forest east of Miselea. They guess it is also accompanied by some Redcap king or queen. They also think that, were they to kill it, they could become incredibly powerful. The freed slaves of the spider nest they attacked promised to help them kill the spider god, and any Redcap that is with it. So one possibility for the PCs is to return to Miselea, enter the kingdom of Ariaki to find the freed slaves of the spiders, and launch a campaign into the wilderness to find and kill the spider god.

What could possibly go wrong with such a venture? And while they are in Ariaki, there is something else they could do …

Researching the Northern Blight

Kyansei, the group’s warrior, is a Wildling from the northern lands. She is traveling in Hadun looking for clues as to the blight that has begun afflicting her homeland, convinced that it has some connection to the deepfolk or some cause in dark magic that the Wildlings do not understand. In Miselea she encountered a delegation from Ariaki, who promised to help her in her inquiries. They have sent messengers to an Academy in the town of Alpon in northern Ariaki, and if the group enters Ariaki on other purposes Kyansei would no doubt want to visit Alpon to find out what they have learnt. Perhaps in Alpon, too, the PCs could learn something of the nature of the fey, to help them kill the spider god … or maybe they would need to visit the elves of the Great Forest to learn such things.

In any case, knowledge is power, and the PCs need more knowledge, particularly about the dark and evil things that lurk in the shadows and stones of this land. Which brings us to …

Aveld the Foul’s Secrets

A side adventure that the PCs could also consider involves uncovering the origins and history of a scholar called Aveld the Foul. The adventuring group whose deaths the PC have traced across the southern lands seemed to have some connection to this man: Siladan the Elder mentioned him in a letter to Verbere the Flame, and insinuated to Regald that the had other scholarship by Aveld the Foul that he was working to translate or understand in some way. If the PCs obtain this documentation from Siladan they could track down any leads to find out who Aveld the Foul was, what he knows about the deepfolk in the region, and whether he has any dark secrets that need to be buried.

Burial is perhaps a theme in the first chapter of this campaign. Which brings us to …

The Standing Stones of the Spine

The PCs discovered some iron buried underground outside Ibara, amongst a scattered mess of very old deepfolk bones. In Miselea Calim mentioned these bones to the local Rimewarden, including explaining his suspicion that the site where they were buried looked like a ritual burial ground or magic site of some kind. This Rimewarden told him that the same patterns of standing stones have been found in other sites along the eastern edge of the Spine Mountains, but that no one had thought of digging beneath them before. He suggested that were Calim to return to Miselea, he could organize an archaeological dig at some of those other sites, and they could begin to answer questions about the purpose of the standing stones, and the nature of the burial that led to these bones being scattered in holes in the ground.

But does anyone care about how and why deepfolk are buried? So long as they are dead, eh?

Conclusion

So these are the choices available to the party, if they choose not to embark on some other jaunt of their own:

  • Find Siladan, talk with him, and learn the history and truth of the adventuring group and the elven documents that got Regald’s daughter killed
  • Investigate Argalt’s stronghold in the Valley of Gon and find out why Argalt was after Regald and his documents, and how he knew of them
  • Kill a spider god, with help from soldiers in Ariaki
  • Travel to Alpon in Ariaki to learn more about the blight afflicting the north, and perhaps also to learn how to kill a spider god and discover more about the fey (or perhaps this would require a journey to an elven settlement)
  • Learn more about the history and secrets of Aveld the Foul
  • Travel to Miselea and then perhaps Rokun, to do some archaeology in the Spine Mountains

As chapter 2 begins, the PCs face choices, and a long, hard path to uncover the secrets of fey, gods, deepfolk and humans. What will they find, and who will they have to kill on the way?

 

March 14, 2021

Archipelago Stronghold: The Tea Merchant’s Compound

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The PCs have raided a tea merchant’s compound and driven out some strange fey creature that was nesting there. A businessman in Estona has offered them the (relatively) unrestricted use of the compound for themselves for one year, and so now they prepare to move in. This post gives a brief description of the compound and its buildings.

The compound belonged to the sister of their benefactor, but she managed it poorly and became entangled in legal trouble with a firm in distant Rokun, which prevented her from selling the place or significantly changing it to some other purpose (such as a stonemason’s yard). It had become unprofitable due to competition from tea merchants in town, and after she died the PCs’ benefactor, Arvil, inherited it. Arvil himself is a successful businessman who is entering retirement, and has little interest at this late stage of his career in rehabilitating a fading investment or taking risks on it, especially given its legal troubles. He is more than happy to let the PCs manage it for a time.

The property is about a half day’s ride east of Estona, on an overgrown track that leaves a fork of a fork from the main eastern road. It has been allowed to become overgrown and is situated in quite thick, boggy forest. The fey that was nesting in the compound had woven some kind of glamour over the forest to make it difficult for people to follow the overgrown path and find the property, which even from the river is difficult to spot in its overgrown state, but the PCs managed to penetrate that glamour and now know how to find the place easily. The primary features of the property are listed here.

1. Lighthouse and pier

The lighthouse is crumbling wood, with unstable stairs inside leading up to a small tower that once held a light. From here there is a good archery position over the whole area but it is difficult to climb to without breaking the stairs or falling until it is repaired.

The pier is also crumbling, and there are no boats on it.

2. Warehouse and office

The warehouse has solid rammed earth and rock foundations, with wide double doors that open into the slightly recessed, cool first floor of the building. There is nothing here except a few trashed crates. Wooden stairs in one corner go up to the second floor, which is a solid wood extension to the first floor. This room contains some smashed up furniture and a long window looking out over the river, with a smaller window looking out over the courtyard. It is another excellent archery post but there is only one way in or out. The windows are jammed shut.

3. Storehouse

This is a white-washed stone building with large doors on two sides. It used to hold food and supplies for the compound (not tea – this was stored in the warehouse near the pier). It is now empty, and the doors smashed.

4. Stables

The stables have 6 stalls, and a little space at one end for stairs leading up to a storage loft.

5. Servants’ quarters

On the western end of the stables is a door that leads under a covered porch to a small servants’ quarters with four beds in it, where the stablehands used to sleep. This room is drafty and empty.

6. Tea workshop

This long, single-story building has solid walls of stone carefully placed together, and good quality tile roofs that are largely intact. Inside the walls are lined with ceramic and the floor is cool slate. Large stone and wood benches stretch down the middle, and a series of large storage cabinets run down the southern wall. The northern wall has faucets for hot water from the hot spring, and also a pump and well system for water from underground. The beastmen used this water and treated the room relatively well, though it is still not clean. A door in the north runs to the onsen, and to the east a door opens to the tea roasting space.

7. Roastery

Tea used to be roasted here and although the roasting oven itself is smashed and useless, the space is perfectly designed for e.g. a forge.

8. Hot spring

The hot spring is in an interior room in this wooden structure. There is a narrow changing area on the outside, with racks for clothes and some old wooden buckets and brushes nearby. A ceramic tube carries water from the spring to the spigots in room 6, and another tube carries it to the kitchen in building 9. There is also a sluice on the eastern wall but it no longer works. The onsen itself is a large rock structure that the wooden frame has been built to obscure, with water rising from an exit point perhaps 3m above ground and falling into a pair of connected pools, one higher than the other. The water from the top is very hot but cools rapidly as it falls to the pools – supernaturally rapidly – until it is just scalding hot in the smaller, higher pool and then perfect temperature in the lower pool. The sluices and ceramic tubes connect to the top where the water emerges, so they deliver essentially boiling water to the rooms each side of this one. Steam rises through vents in the ceiling, and smaller gaps in the rocks allow small floods of water to fall around the main rocky structure onto slate floors. Beneath the slate are several layers of wood, through which the water seems to seep relatively comfortably, and the ground outside the building is not especially wet. Water from the lower pool runs away into a crack at the base of the pool where it disappears presumably underground. The only hint as to the magical nature of the pool is the strange speed at which the water cools.

9. Longhouse central office

This is the building where the tea merchant would conduct business with visiting traders, and also where the tea merchant himself lived. The first floor has a recessed floor and walls of solid brick and earth, like a typical Archipelago longhouse. In the centre of the area is a large firepit, surrounded on three sides by chairs and with a table between the firepit and the western entrance. To the east is the main entry area, a small porch-like structure with double sliding doors leading east and a separate entrance that opens to a covered walkway extending across to the hostelry. The western side of the main room has steps leading up to a small kitchen and stairs that go up to the second floor. The second floor has three rooms: on the eastern end a bedroom, in the middle a study and office, and on the western end a small sitting room area. The servant who worked here has a small sleeping room abutting the hostelry. The beastman sheltered in here, and it is trashed and stinking with refuse and rotten meat. The fey leader lurked in the rooms above on the second floor, which probably require a good cleansing religious ritual before they are comfortable for humans to use.

10. Hostelry

This is a simpler wooden building with stone reinforcement on the side facing the river. Its first floor is a wide, open living and dining area, with a kitchen on one side and beyond that a small set of servants’ quarters for a total of four servants. Stairs in the main living area lead up to a set of sleeping areas, with space for six separate rooms with two people in each. There is a small bathroom on the ground floor, which looks over the river. A bath in this bathroom uses water drawn from the onsen, but this whole building is musty and abandoned.

11. Gardens

The gardens here are now in disarray but used to hold a sizable herb garden, and could do again if cultivated. There is a small glasshouse, with some panes currently damaged, and a shed with tools for gardening.

All of these areas are damaged and run-down, and some parts (such as the Longhouse itself) have been badly soiled by the beastmen who lived there until the PCs drove them out. The Onsen is fully functional, and anyone spending the night in the fully restored compound recovers 2 wounds per night instead of one. Anyone who spends a week fully resting here with appropriate care upgrades resilience checks to recover from critical wounds, and all healing spells and medicine checks performed to recover from critical wounds are upgraded. Attempts to brew healing potions in the tea workshop are also upgraded once due to the benefits of using magical healing water to prepare them, but the difficulty of brewing poisons is upgraded once for the same reason.

The compound can serve as a tier 3 stronghold, with one free tier 1 feature (the onsen) that does not count toward the limit of tier 1 features. It easily has accommodation for all the PCs, and the servants rooms can be adapted to easily accommodate Selina and Laiea. Some extra work will be required to enable the addition of a barracks – for example installing a dormitory above the stables, or reforming the hostelry to allow the guards and the PCs to have rooms in the one building. Nonetheless, the compound offers a versatile base of operations for a group of adventurers interested in settling down and using all the opportunities Estona has to offer as they chase up the many mysteries left over from their exploration of southern Hadun.

 

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