Lessons Learned

I've put my current campaign on indefinite hiatus and I've been trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. After much thought I think I have a pretty good idea.

Scale

I adapted Skerple's GLOG, adapted Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands, adapted Michael Curtis' Stonehell, mashed them together and spread the resultant slurry out onto a cooled marble countertop; went through the Labyrinth Lord monster manual, reskinned everything that appeared in Stonehell to better fit the science-fantasy-gonzo setting, restatted them all for the GLOG; went through the megadungeon itself, rewrote all the room descriptions to move away from tasteless oatmeal paste fantasy to something more umami, redid the mapping and exploration procedures; and yet when things really got into motion and the players breached the dungeon for the first time after months of playing, I realized all the prep I did either amounted to not at all enough or far too much. I floundered often, misunderstood or forgot my own overtuned mechanics and procedures, but then sweated and failed to improvise interesting encounters one minute and overcompensated the next, sticking slavishly to the purpley, overwritten narratives I'd managed to prep beforehand. 

Time

No campaign of any chunky substance can be sustained on the amount of time my group was able to devote to it. At most, sessions were 3 hours every 2 weeks, often shorter and less frequent. To cement (an attempt at) a make-believe world that doesn't rely on the meme-meat of standard western fantasy in the minds of players and GM requires repeated, lengthy, consistent exposure and habitation. I bet, anyway. You can't teach and reinforce new mechanics, and you can't easily tell what's working and what isn't, without that exposure. You can't build a web of relationships with characters and factions when you only talk to them a couple of hours a month. Trying to do all that anyway only results in frustration and fatigue for everyone involved; prep is the cost, play is the benefit, and I was deep in a sunken-cost fallacy for a long time.

This discord between intention and reality was without a doubt the biggest reason why the game started to feel like a chore. Why should I subject myself and my friends to salvaging a D&D game that wasn't working when I could be having a much better time with them playing a board game or watching Iron Chef or whatever?

Ability

GMing is a weird business. It requires (at least) two skillsets that, at least for me, seem to originate in totally unrelated parts of the brain: 1, the slow solitary creative artistic ability to dream up a detailed alien place full of people and things - to take a bunch of stolen and original elements that you think are cool and design/nurture them into an espalier over many periods of quiet, many periods of writing and rewriting, until you've made something detailed enough that the illusion of depth is achieved and it becomes a whole thing ----- and 2, the quick active social improvisational performative ability to present that thing to other people in real time and have them inhabit it and dynamically react/break/reform it realistically according to their actions in order to MAINTAIN the illusion of depth, so that it's not just a bunch of cool ideas you like and not just a novel made out of those cool ideas such that it becomes something new but something alive and responsive to other people doing story-telling with you!

What the fuck!!!

And there's another layer if you're playing in a system because without a bounding box of rules/cracks in the cliff there's not much to grab onto and you're left playing a storygame, which is fine. But if you want to activate the epiphany engine in the human brain you need to give it a problem and give it tools and you ask for a solution, so you have to design the tools too.

Turns out I am passably good at the first thing and much much less good at the second, and only kinda okay at the third, so I attempted to compensate by doing as much of the first thing ahead of time and leaning on what I'd written during play. I will say that out of everything, bantery NPC interactions were consistently enjoyable, but I suspect that's because bantery NPC interactions are only one or two steps removed to just talking and joking with your friends, which (and I don't know if many people know this) turns out you can just DO without having to invest in a make-believe elfgame.

Experience

What have we learned children, well I will tell you now

1. Calibrate the depth and complexity of your elfgame according to the ability of the parties involved to interact with it. The fewer spoons the people you're playing with have to spare for your game the more you should lean on established tropes, familiar ludonarrative concepts, and lower-impact decisions. Trying to force something complex and high-concept into a couple of hours in a tiny apartment with one shitty coffee table and not enough chairs is a recipe for disappointment.

2. Write your own stuff so that you feel most comfortable and natural while immersed in it. My attempt to take no less than three published or semi-published works with three sets of pre-conceived notions variously at odds with one another and synthesize something with a degree of internal consistency was never going to work seamlessly. Narratively, it might be generously argued that, at least externally, I appeared to successfully present a cohesive world to my players; mechanically, such a compliment could never be unblushingly paid. The rules were all over the fuckin place, and even if it looked from the outside like I had the fiction under control, the head-on mental collisions between the various source materials from which I airlifted the bulk of everything resulted in delays, flinches, inconsistencies, confusion, and arbitrary rulings. 

3. Be good at both the creative and the dynamic aspects of the hobby. If you're lacking in one aspect, it's better to do your best to improve it rather than lean more heavily on the other to try and compensate. In my case, I learned that unless your prep constitutes hundreds of hours of work, huge planned out decision trees, plans and backup plans and backup backup plans, you cannot present your players with the kind of dynamic world that comes with experienced improvisation, and even if your prep IS that insane, A) you're going to burn out very quickly and B) your players will still do things you didn't account for. 

Without the ability to make stuff up on the fly, to iterate on your ideas in the moment, you will inevitably begin to push your players away. Eventually this cements in the mind a creative hierarchy in which your fiction is absolute, where, because change and reactivity is uncomfortable to you, the other people playing the game become rogue agents who must be corralled and railroaded into the correct decision trees. The entire enterprise moves away from the collaborative and the magical and towards a  powerpoint presentation.

4. Play on a real table. The table is so, so crucial. It establishes the spacetime it occupies as one in which we are engaged with each others imaginations. On it we spread our character sheets and random generation tables. Sitting at it, we are drawn into each other and mutually connected to a central stage where the dice-actors play their parts. The standard visually- and kinesthetically-pleasing height of around 30 inches off the ground unites our focus on each other and by extension on the shared imagined world; like any good set, the table we play on needs to disappear beneath the drama it facilitates. 

This is the table WE played on and I hate it's stupid guts.

The slats mean you can't roll dice without either a bulky tray or bringing them to your lap and rolling them on a laptop or a book or something, which removes the dice, their result, and you yourself from play and the attention of the people you're playing with. It's so short that you need to bend your field of view away from the players around you and uncomfortably stoop, even from a seated position, to do anything on it; the height also means you can't pull right up to it because you'll hit your shins. It's too small to comfortably hold three people's character sheets (and beers and so on), much less five. 

I hate this fucking table, but IN REALITY it is myself that I hate. It's a very bad gaming table, but no one in their right mind should ever ask it to do anything more complicated than sit in front of a couch and store books or whatever on the bottom shelf part. Like a bad parent, the table's failings are really my own. I was asking it to do things it was never designed or imagined to do, and yet I was also unwilling to buy a new table, a larger, more robust table, more suited to my table needs. After all, we only played twice a month.

If I run anything else in the near future, it will be a pared-down, simpler adventure, not a sandbox, and one either lifted fully from someone else's brain (Patrick Stuart's Demon Bone Sarcophagus should be arriving in my mailbox soon, I hope), or fully original, not stitched together from a bunch of other people's stuff. And it will be played on a well-lit, solid, roomy table.

Introducing Gont

You arrive in the morning, filthy, red-eyed, a single donkey and a single days-worth of food left between you. As the sun just begins to reach its fingers above the horrible headache-inducing violet haze which rings the eastern horizon, its first visible EM emissions of the day illuminate your destination –

GONT: The Rainbow confederacy’s westernmost interest of any considerable size, kept alive mainly by passing Hexad-sponsored mule trains and dwarfen die-sel vech convoys, a glorified mountainside truck stop before grander, more profitable locales in the wild west. The township squats inside an ancient earth-toned ringwall of dryland coral, twisting in post-modernist, spike-covered branches, built around a deep natural spring. Before the east-facing gate and arcing left and right are patched and re-patched polytarp hobo tents, the majority abandoned, a few small barrel fires marking continued habitation. Would-be adventurers. A couple of career caravan bodyguards patrol the outskirts on camelback, mostly Bluelanders, escapees from prejudice.

This is a stronghold of Eastern habits and culture in a sea of endless grass and ruined wonders. That Gont is a shithole barely held together by the mutual interests of faraway Rainbowland oligarchs is a secondary detail; they have an IDENTITY, they go to CHURCH, they’re going to make MAD STACKS OF CASH out here in the middle of nowhere, FUCK YOU.

The cold dry season is in full swing, and the desiccating wind carries dust and tiny razors of ice straight into your eyes. The needlegrass lies brown and brittle, close to the cracked earth. Just inside the gate, mudbrick and concrete walls, wooden beams but not many, trees being relatively rare; mud streets, deep tire treads and wagon furrows, only ~90 permanent residents but the population swells by hundreds with the passage of caravans, state officials sent to speak with the khans of the steppe clans, fugitives, members of the Fifth Estate (undocumented ghost people), ETC.


YOU AWAKEN in the room at L’Ultime Motel you had rented the night prior. It was the cheapest one they had so there’s only one bed and a battered tin samovar bolted onto the floor in the middle of the room, a fiberglass basin w/ bucket of cold water, rugs, tapestries, bars on the window. This room’s only 6 sp a night; there’s a two-bed for 12 sp and a four-bed for 20 sp, plus 1 sp per day for taking care of your donkey.

L’ULTIME MOTEL is a three-story pile of shacks on top of a garage. The in-house vech-tech Adipose Jellyguts bangs his articulated porcelain multitool arm around in the depths of some rusted out dwarfen road yacht, screaming at underlings.

The woman who runs the books (Assolta Pistola) and gives you your key (bright brass with a bulky plastic gnome hanging from the keyring) looks like a spider trying to impersonate a human, long and haunting, pregnant pauses, constant calculations, constant activity, but in between bookkeeping she emerges from her administrative web and makes her rounds, checking on boarders, listening at doors, making sure all is well in an accidentally very unnerving way.

The rooms are small with iron bars on the windows, but soft, warm, tapestries and rugs, a samovar each, paper talismans tiled beneath the mattresses, folded into squares, to prevent bad dreams. A nomad custom; when you sleep on new grass every night, next to unfamiliar ghosts, such practices are important.

The attached and jointly-owned public house, Obol’s, is half-underground, serves warm beer with little limes, and boasts a menu of traditional steppe-nomad cuisine altered subtly for the tastes of Rainbowlander caravaneers (more salt and far fewer invertebrates). Pilaf, sausage, lots of horse meat, soft bread. Everything is served by Alka One-Arm, radially-symmetrical nine-armed symbiote-junkie, nervous system replaced by mycelium, smiley, cheerful.

The Plaza Mercat, yurts, always in motion, everything either setting up or tearing down, loading or unloading, surplus goods or trinkets picked up along the route, cherenkov cherries too close to spoiling to make it to the cities; steppelander stalls, marked by the sigil of the Yuzu or the Pomelo, cultural envoys, they’ve got:

    Tinctures for health and enhancement (half-functional nanite slurry drawn up from oldtech reservoirs by crude man-powered pumpjacks, tinctures of yuckwheat)

    Fragile pearls strung on cords and made into bracelets (they form in the bellies of the magical barnacle snail around irritating flashes of half-real cosmic particles as they are caught by the karmic lining of the beasts stomach, crush them to bewilder ghosts)

    Good-luck charms of sparrow skulls and porcelain carvings of the same, alternating, can barely tell one from the other

    Bullets, bullets of every caliber, every shape (each one crafted by the clan gunsmith, or more likely their apprentices, old forge-devices and magics cajol explosive elementals into lead and splintering iron, they are sleeping now, but the spark of the gun-wand is all it takes to begin the reaction and if you listen carefully you can hear them dream as you reload)

    A few expensive guns, locked tight in translucent plaz cases, bound with charmed copper wire and three tiny padlocks each. Their names are written on little slips of paper stuck on the front; “STONE COLD,” “VIOLENT REENTRY,” “WIDE SWATHE” (Rainbow names; the guns are multilingual, and will understand if you cannot pronounce the nom de guerre inscribed in their hearts upon the machining altar)

    Oils and sauces, a thousand spices, a million ingredients, years of quiet slow fermentation produce viscous substances of shocking color, seen through perfectly clear jars of glass; remove the lid and be careful not to faint as the transcendent odor washes over you, meta-umami, the flavor OF flavor

    Strange meat, curlicues of sausage, shelled spring rabbits, skins and furs, the meager bounty of the steppe; nacrepede and sunscarab roasted, sold by the bag; dried yonderpods, lemongrass, ampules of concentrated honey



There is also, always, an ongoing wrestling match happening in the circle of white stones in front of Grandma Soolie, the retrofitted rickety pump system that draws water up from some deep aquifer. The clans have brought their sport of choice to this place: wrestling. Two unadorned human beings enter. No pouches, no kicks, no weapons, nothing but grappling and throwing;  This can go on for hours. Anyone with a score to settle with you (or who just wants to prove themselves more manly) will challenge you to this endurance sport before a more deadly fight.

The pillories lie not far away. Old blood stains the wood in splotches.


The chapel is old, looks like it was carved from a single rock, tessellated polygons like turtleshell plates or fractal geometry, obvious signs of petromancy —

    (in which the provided stone is imbued with animating spirits pre-programmed with mnemonic blueprints and set in motion by the wizard/astral foreman, then directed to produce repeating shapes (more stable generation that way, requiring less attention from the caster, and therefore the mark of a great petromancer is the appearance of complex, non-similar facets in the grain and pattern of the final product), smoothed or textured according to the client’s desire, trimmed and edited at corners, crenelations, buttresses, etc., to finally produce a finished structure, onto which doors, windows, and additional flooring or paneling (if one were so inclined) are added, the entire process taking months or years according to the scope of the project, the skill of the wizard, any alterations made to the design, or any inauspicious astral occurrences which might distract or otherwise hinder the constructive activity of the spirits; to prevent this an active petromantic zone is often guarded by birdskull good luck charms, jadewood totems, notched silver rods driven into the earth, or more commonly (especially in Safranje and Oranje, where the art is most honored) blessed origami strung on white twine.)

Inside is sparse, prayer mats on the floor, fading tapestries on the walls of various scenes from historio-scripture (traditionally the first tapestry is black, for the Forgetting, then the fabrication of the First God of Man, Corpus Mundi (the Needle in the Eye of the World), the creation of the sacral calendar, then various depictions of the saints and their good works).

STONEHELL #3

A pretty good one!!!

THE CAST:

Clariandra, 11 year-old little necromancer girl, looking for her dad, collects thumbs

Krema Affogato, very tall mutated thief, coffee addict, hyper-capitalist

Dave, teen barbarian, dumb as hell, heart of gold

Lucidius, orgish street-preaching lunatic mystic of Mother Silicon, metal jaw

The box canyon in a greener, warmer time of year

1. The group continues their exploration of the canyon. The ruined foundations of guard barracks and administration buildings are bare except for one, in which a small shrine to St. Mohorovicic, He who Sealed the Serious Hells, is set up in the center. Pale blue scraps of ribbon are wound around the statue's fingers and arms; Lucidius explains that this is a folk custom of Omnitheists on the steppe, where each ribbon represents a prayer. Everyone takes a second to partake in the ritual.*

2. Skipping past the visible caves for now, they examine the northern (STONEHELL-facing) side of the gatehouse, read some adventurer graffiti, and peer nervously into the darkened interior. Lucidus hears some snatches of sound from the eastern entrance, lights up his lantern (I guess he did buy lighting? w/e) and quietly ventures in. The rest follow.

3. Little of interest in the first room they search, but the second contains a collapsed writing desk, a pile of rotten cloth and wood that was once a bed, and a spray of ash across one wall with a negative-space handprint in the center. 

4. Lucidius hands his lantern to Clariandra and smashes the ruined bed with his mace. There is a great splortch and two surviving VENEMOUS NACREPEDES squirm outwards, bent on revenge for their slain brothers. Lucidius' orgish physiology resists the sickening effects of their bite but he still suffers a couple of mandible-wounds.

5. He manages to grab one before it gets into his pants, but it takes 3 more full rounds of combat with everyone else involved to kill the remaining centipede. He takes a moment to recover and curse his "detestable carbon body."

6. Krema cautiously investigates the handprint; the ash reforms wherever it is disturbed. Reasoning this is some kind of magical bullshit, potentially involving an invisible man, she drives a dagger into the center of the handprint, finding nothing invisible but depressing a hidden button. A trapdoor grinds partially open, the mechanism quickly snapping in half but revealing a corroded metal ladder.

7. Beneath they find a tiny room subject to an ancient fermentation disaster: Burst glass bottles, dark stains on the walls, broken all-chemy equipment, etc. There is, however, one survivor, the contents of which is sniffed, found to smell fucking amazing, and quickly decanted into a sturdier container. There is also a fine, impossibly well-preserved black leather jacket and a lovely poncho stitched in the Pomelo clan style, the pattern encoding a temperature-regulation enchantment (resist cold).

8. As all four PC cram themselves into this tiny basement-closet, the door to the room they're in creaks open (first random encounter of the campaign). Three ash-streaked double-jointed mutated little freakazoids demand the intruders show themselves, but get a 9 for the reaction roll, which means all they really want is for the party to quietly get out of their hideout (these were the source of the sounds Lucidius caught at the front door). 

9. None of the PCs have a great grasp of steppelander politics, but half-true, three-quarters-racist rumors inform them that without a centralized judicial system, the nomad clans deal with criminals and traitor-gangs by driving them into the middle of the grasslands and abandoning them to dehydration and the vomes; if they make it back alive it means they've proven their worth and can petition the khan for re-entry into the clan, but popular knowledge is that this never ever happens and the banished criminals either die or turn into crazed hyper-violent survivalists. These three, the party assumes from inside their hole, are the latter.

the general vibe

9. Dave shouts that no one is here and that they should go away and look somewhere else. Krema emerges from the nook, draws herself up to her full (7 foot) height, and asks who dares speak to Her, a Very Important Person, in such a way. One of them says they are of the Rebar Clan in a thick steppe patois; another tightens her grip on a long iron rod studded with clinging concrete and starts looking agitated. "Thiz our place. We do it nicen easy, you begone. We hidenout! Begone!"

10. Krema sneers, demands that they put down their primitive weapons and get out of her face, or else they'll be taken to one of her "many successful plantations" in the Violetlands to toil as "unpaid interns." The one with the iron rod grits her teeth, hisses, and without further warning steps forward and smashes it into Krema's shoulder, rolling max damage. Diplomacy has failed; the other Rebar clansmen draw their shitty knives. 

11. The entire party loses their initiative rolls, which means one of their foes runs over to the half-open trapdoor and begins to wrench it closed with everyone else still inside while the other attempts to stab Krema's knees. Dave, on his turn, spiral-jumps out of the narrowing-opening and carves one of the mutants in half like a fucking christmas ham. Lucidius and Krema bludgeon the rod-wielder to death between them, and Clariandra pops her head aboveground, tells the remaining guy to "stop being so impolite," and casts Wernher's Redistribution of Vitality at him. The man seems to age a decade in seconds and runs away in abject terror.

12. Krema, filled with hot wet fury, gives immediate pursuit. The little freak leads her forward down a long dark hallway. As he attempts to clamber up a shoddy ladder and through a partially-open trapdoor in the ceiling, she catches up with him and stabs him to death. They loot the bodies for their silver, and, in Clariandra's case, their eyeballs.

*Mechanically this was meant to give +1 to the first check per character that failed by exactly 1, but my players actually unpromptedly texted me specific prayers, so maybe St Moho will help in a more specific way? 

Kills: 4 Nacrepedes, 3 Rebar Warriors (50 xp)

Loot: Cool leather jacket (10 sp), poncho of resist cold (250 sp), "healing potion," bits of silver worth 24 sp 

STONEHELL #2

Another regrettably short session. We're not in the dungeon yet, so I'm still trying to inch everyone into the highly-systematized, high-lethality jacuzzi, but I feel like maybe I went a little too loosey-goosey with the combat specifically. The Ghost Beggars are now canonically a much less capable and seasoned crew than they perhaps should have been, but on the other hand the party rolled really well for the most part, so it may not have mattered that much.

THE CAST:

Clariandra, 11 year-old little necromancer girl, looking for her dad 

Krema Affogato, very tall mutated thief, coffee addict

Dave, teen barbarian, dumb as hell

Lucidius, street-preaching lunatic mystic of Mother Silicon, metal jaw

Lucidius' donkey, I believe at this point unnamed, who I forgot to mention last writeup

1. Clariandra, realizing she is alone in a dark wet cavern, begins to cry very loudly and pitifully. Three of the remaining seventeen bandits arrive and begin surrounding Lucidius, who is the only one remaining in the stable-cave.

2.  He briefly attempts to convince them he is a simple pilgrim spreading the good word of Our Exalted Mistress of Chrome before picking up a rock and throwing it very hard at one of the boys behind him. He crits and crushes his target's skull, killing him instantly. Lucidius uses this opportunity to run the fuck away. 

3. The bandits arrive in full force. Their leader, a large man with an eyepatch and a big shiny breastplate with a heraldric snail on it, starts screaming orders for a sweep of the hideout. He sends a group of three to investigate the pitiful weeping coming from the direction of the watch post.

4. Meanwhile, Krema, having successfully snuck back into the stables amidst the standoff with Lucidius, emerges from her hiding spot and cuts the remaining (incredibly panicky) horses free, rolling well and escaping back outside as they begin kicking the shit out of the rallying bandits.

5. The three brigands find Clariandra (whose skills include "crocodile tears") sniffling in the dark. They grab her and she asks through very wet eyes if they're going to be her new dads, which I decree forces a morale roll, shaking the confidence of one of her captors ("Don't know about this lads, don't seem right do it").

6. Dave, having shed his armor to appear like more like a civilian and holding his bloody sword behind his back, runs through the watch post shouting about his "lost sister". He thanks the bandits profusely for finding her ("We'll just be on our way, kind sirs. If only more people were like you three"). This succeeds in confusing them further, but they do not relinquish their captive.

7. The boss arrives, having gotten the horse situation mostly under control, and announces that unless the entire party presents themselves and all of their possessions RIGHT NOW, the girl's getting stabbed. 

8. Clariandra is currently being restrained by three dudes, but one of them really doesn't have his heart in it. She succeeds at a heavily penalized roll to break free, and the group sprints out of the cave system down the cliff trail, Lucidius having at this point retrieved his donkey from its hiding place in a bush - and having killed another bandit on his way out. They catch up at the base of the trail, panting and relieved, and, as far as they can tell, unfollowed.

9. The canyon they find themselves in is none other than that legendary murder pit, the shaded entrance to STONEHELL! It's the cold dry season in the UVG, but warm mist issues inexplicably from a spot across the canyon floor, where a large waterfall thunders down the cliff and into a deep, clear pool, ringed by lush ferns and reeds. The group investigates and finds a silver hoop embedded at the bottom of the pool, through which the water seems to somehow be draining. 

10. Krema is a mutant, and as one result of her genetic corruption she enjoys some limited aqualinguistic ability. She attempts to speak to the waterfall (named Walterfall) who doesn't have very much useful to say; he says that he is of two parts, that some of him sees day and night and some of him sees only darkness, and that his heat comes from a narrow place far away. 

11. Lucidius and Dave step into a thicket of enchanted trees that turns you into a tree while you're in there, sliding around like the Chameleon spell in Dark Souls. This freaks Dave very much out.

11. Stock is taken of the rest of the canyon's contents: The ruined gatehouse to the south, a total of 8 natural and manmade tunnels into the cliffs, 5 crumbling foundations, the thicket, the waterfall, and the imposing entrance to STONEHELL itself.

Kills: 1 Ghost Beggar, 1 Highwayman (20 xp)

STONEHELL #1

I began, finally, after not one nor two but THREE false starts and several months-worth of delays due to clashing schedules and various sicknesses -- I began a hopefully long-for-this-world campaign of Stonehell, set in a corner of Luka Rejec's UVG, played in my slightly-customized version of Skerple's iconic Rats on Sticks GLOGhack, with some degree of success, I would say? It went okay. 

THE BACKGROUND:

Stonehell was a ancient prison-experiment of an insane king of a dying city-state on the geographical and cultural line between Rainbowland Civilization and Ultraviolet Grassland Barbarism. Eventually the city-state fell and the prison was cracked open to reveal not a prison after all but an apparently-infinite series of halls and galleries and rooms and cells excavated by the now thoroughly-crazed vitamin D-deficient inmates. Fast forward 120 years and it's a 10-level hive of monsters and freaks and Very Large Jewels, or in other words it has turned (conveniently) into a megadungeon. There's a shitty town 4 hours away from the dungeon called Gont, which despite being the Rainbow Confederacy's western-most interest of any considerable size is essentially a glorified truck stop in the middle of the steppelands full of migrants, mercenaries, fugitives, and caravaneers.

THE CAST:

Clariandra, 11 year-old little necromancer girl, looking for her dad 

Krema Affogato, very tall mutated thief, coffee addict

Dave, teen barbarian, dumb as hell

Lucidius, street-preaching lunatic mystic of Mother Silicon, metal jaw

1. The group waks up in the cheapest room at L'Ultime Motel they could get, one bed, bars on the window, poisonously-strong coffee and soft bread for breakfast. 

2. Onboarded them into action as least-terribly as I could manage; they approach the polytarp yurt of Guapo Pasgeddi, headman of a profit-sharing association of gold-rush-esque merchant suppliers, who is delighted that he has more bodies to throw at the Ghost Beggar problem (Stonehell's "Supplement One," detailing a cave network full of bandits and an alternate entrance to the dungeon). 800 silver is promised for proof of dispersal or proof of the death of the Ghost Beggar leader. A coupon is provided, good for half-off any one shopping trip with the merchants he represented, which the party ignores.

The Brigand Caves

3. Having bought zero supplies (Lucidius had purchased a bottle of cheap wine), they arrive at the poorly-hidden entrance to the bandits' hideout in the cliffs surrounding Stonehell, through which Dave charges into a cave-stable. Two badly-equipped highwaymen yell and run for reinforcements; the horses are unimpressed.

4: One runs to a nearby watch-post (room 5), and is stabbed nearly to death in the narrow preceding tunnel by Dave. Lucidius wins initiative, runs up behind Dave, shoves a chromium femur past his head and casts THE WRATH OF GOD IN ALL ITS GLORY (Cleric Laser) at the three filthy brigands playing bridge in the room beyond. They are left singed and reeling; Dave is left completely blind. Lucidius rolls a 4 on his magic die and is therefore out of divine favor for the day.

5: The bandit captain screams at his underlings to circle around outside the cave complex and get them from the back, then fails his morale roll, pisses his pants, and runs out after him. Dave takes a hit, Clariandra casts Wernher's Redistribution of Vitality at the man in front of him, rolls a 1 for damage, and watches him fall over dead, skin subtly wrinkling.

6: Dave blindly runs through the southern tunnel in an angry haze to look for more things to kill. Clariandra cuts off the thumbs of the dead and puts them in a little bag. The sounds of shouting and commotion reach them from distant caverns as news of the intrusion reaches the rest of the bandits.

7: Krema deals with the two underlings circling around the front of the cave by spooking a couple of the (by now fairly agitated) horses, which charge into their caretakers and launch them off hilariously the edge of the cliff.

8: Clariandra uses her turn to stroll around the back of the complex (room 6), which is the first unlit section anyone had encountered; unfortunate, since, again, no one had bought any supplies (no torches). By feel alone, she is able to find a low tunnel behind some very old crates.

Since this was the first session in months, there was a lot of bullshitting before we could start properly, so that was all we had time for. There are 3 Ghost Beggars in room 3 and 13 more scattered around the cave, so we essentially stopped 1 combat round away from the party getting swarmed; I expect deaths unless they can intelligently weasel their way out of their own stupidity and unpreparedness. Maybe they can lose them in the cramped tunnels in the back (17 and 18) or in the old unused barracks (7, 8, 9), but more likely I expect them to simply run away, maybe explore some of the other caves around Stonehell, and probably get ambushed by angry bandits on their way back to Gont.

Kills: 1 Ghost Beggar, 3 Highwaymen (40 xp)

Campaign Notes Part 3

The series continues. Minimally edited and even less playable. Enjoy?

You douse the fire. Steam and smoke flood the shore and mingle with the mist hanging on the surface of the water.

Plunged into a vault of mist - silence; you can hardly see the rest of the party  - a soft light , the low honk of a horn   - the light resolves; forms a skull in the fog; then you see the lamp  - wrought iron lantern of a edvard munch scream, white electric light pouring from eyes and mouth   - THE BOAT, the chugging of a motor; hull looks like strips of metal wasp-paper curling around a precious cargo, a cabinfull of ghoulish passengers   - a gothic combustion engine and propeller assembly at the stern churns the river into froth  - the cabin is stained glass and metal, can see silhouettes within, murmuring conversation, some passengers lean off the side but all give the ferryman a wide berth   - at the prow stands THE FERRYMAN; raises a hand and the boat pulls to a stop by the shore - two wire thralls slap a sheet metal ramp onto the beach - he is a tall hulk wrapped in fur coats and brass wire   -fishbowl helmet, inside swirling black smoke, two tiny points glowing like stars   - skeletal hands bedecked with rings and bracelets    - wields dire magics, can call the water forth to strangle and restrain, can rise on cold winds, then floats over and blasts you with a sawn off shotgun - controls the boat with one of his rings, opals in a propeller pattern    - silent, polite, stoic. You paid him after all. Doesn’t ask questions visavis being dead, but will boot you if you’re obviously not  - has 800 silver worth of rings and shit, also his eyes fall when killed and roll around inside the fishbowl, eclipsed suns, swallowing one grants CURSED ABMORTALITY

SEVEN “SOULS” RIDE THE FERRY

Outside the cabin: Bok-tet, a kaballist, human leather coat, a shard of obsidian ritual knife hung about the neck. A lucky member of the blue god conspiracy, was granted undeath by his deity before it was annihilated, you’ll find lots of ghouls from around then. The tell-tale rings of the Dead God’s touch. Rebellious, callous, harsh, still dedicated to the tenets that lead him to his forbidden worship – that death is a malfunction, the end of all mourning, etc. Aware this would lead to his starvation, now.

Mollusca Iona, skin like yellow parchment, fat and luxurious, biomechane visor, blinky light bulb jewelry; she is a frequent visitor of the market, murmurs deeply, “hope the band is more lively this year… those princes should be an interesting display… have to remember to finally sample that stew…” 

HISTORY: First bite was at a dark aristocratic dinner in the now-fallen Decapolitan city of Ulkan in the Orangelands, 900 years ago. Red candles, weeping servants. Weeping guests too, once they tasted the meat. Exquisite. Used vast wealth to replace failing organs, eyes, etc, but soon was mostly unnecessary since, like all ghouls if they last long enough, her expanding labyrinthine digestive system does all the work.

Hunder and Yuna, orphan children, skeleton siblings, look out for each other. Hunder has a floppy cap, Yuna has dressed up for the occasion, spell engines grip their spines, escaped from a mad sorcerer’s basement laboratory. Untrusting, dark jokes, Hund is glum, Yuna is a realistic optimist. Not ghouls, but welcome at their Market.

 

Inside the cabin: Ruins-Your-Life, Steppelander ghoul from the lost Tangelo tribe, a wendigo who has acquired a taste for the luxuries of settled civilization that only the Market can provide (century eggs and human pate, specifically, but also fungal cheeses and liquid memories) and is journeying there for the first time. Standoffish and unaccustomed to company. Wears a wide, shadowy sombrero, has three sets of stacked eyes like the pips on a die, very skinny and crooked.

IN THEIR PACK: Some GOLP, skipping stones, locks of kid hair, pouch of gravedirt, teeth, ghoul pants, eyedrops.

Pen name Gunja Teabag, ghoul novellista, producer of penny dreadfuls distributed through underground channels and read mainly by perverts. Maintains a writerly attitude, but in reality she’s never written a word of fiction. Every terrible thing in her books she has done or seen done. First seen by the party wiping away the last of the cocoa face paint she applies to appear human. Has unfinished manuscripts in her luggage, worth a great deal of dangerous money if completed and published. 

And finally Vynn Pozzani, once a die-sel miner, trapped by a cave-in and ate her crewmates to survive, grew twisted and dark and found her way to the Market from above many years ago, keeps their ears on a necklace even now, “Extraction Crew 077”, slipped into solipsism to deal with the event - she moves through the world like an RPG protagonist, no one else is really real. 

Of these, only Bok-Tet and Gunja have weapons other than claws - the first casts rituals that summon choking clouds and decay, the second has a hidden pouch of scalpels, hooks, tweezers, and pins that she can use and throw as daggers.

The cabin and engine are both guarded by a pair of wire thralls, patchy plaz skin sheets, LED eyes, human skeleton wound with thin copper tendons, CPU boxes in chest cavity protected by aluminum spheres bolted to ribs; reprogram or add new instruction by feeding punched cards into slot in the front (scraps of paper around their feet), external speaker visible in neck, just fucking awful to look at. Armed with truncheons, stoles depicting a field of yellow stars on a violet background.

STR: 12 DEX: 6  CON: 12 INT,WIS,CHA: 1   HP: 10 ATK: 12 DEF: 14 DMG: 1d6 MOVE: 25

Robo Scream: As long as speakerbox in throat is not damaged, starts combat by screaming.

Hugs and detonates onboard plastic explosive charge if very low HP (test to resist, else 1d12 damage)

The cabin guards are there just to make sure nothing untoward happens during the trip. The engine guards actively prevent fuckery by drawing their clubs if anyone approaches.

The engine is covered by a tarp-tent stretched over rusted poles (macabre charms hang from the tarp, bundles of chicken bones, little crude dolls, ribbons, strings of teeth, etc). Chugs along, coughs black smoke, chops at the River with a big propeller. Extra jerry cans of guzzolene strapped to the back wall of the cabin.

Campaign Notes Part 2

WHERE MIGHT THE PARTY DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE PATHS INTO THE GREAT GHOUL MARKET????

ONE: A scuffle in the streets by the university! Two fucking ancient bastards croak and swing at each other with trembling arthritic hands! They are Historians, and these sorts of displays are all-too-common: The Wall of Mist that occludes the past makes archeology a desperately, wincingly sloppy affair. A crowd of hooting students gathers, upperclassmen taking bets.

Here we have a Folklorist of the Close Analysis School in a rage against a Phenomonologist of the Flexible Paradigm. What do they disagree on? Everything, but specifically the ultimate fate of the Kingdoms of the Dead (known only via half-legible copper tablets dredged up from the murky depths of Lago de Kloeken and a strata of compressed marrow/court finery extracted from the surrounding region), the circumstances of their fall, even their geographical placement!

The Folklorist, Hasbint Drennoti, holds that the Kingdoms were dragged beneath the earth by ravens after a lengthy succession crisis (the first of its kind, after the King, Hasbint shouts, “did the first Double Death”), eventually becoming one of the Benign Hells. The Phenomonologist, Kontrast McPoffin, holds that the Kingdoms were obliterated by a vengeful meteor after the Prince launched a curse-engine into space to impress a girl.

Speaking to the Folklorist will reveal more information about the Hells and their occasional contact with the surface. Speaking to Kontrast will be boring and confusing, but will still mention his rival's theories dismissively. The winner of the fight will collapse into a nearby dumpster and fall asleep on a bed of needles and coffee filters.

TWO: Deep within Eigengrau University's library! A book on the Hells explains that, sometimes, beneath a particularly dense concentration of souls, a Hell may extend a questing pseudopod upward from below and graze the underground underbelly of basements and sewers; and that if the enterprising urban explorer ventures deep enough into the stinky depths, they may find a tunnel newly dug, marked upon the roof with an iron ring, or a wooden staircase fresh and clean in the wall of rock, and through these uncanny passages one may pass into the liminal space between the layers of the earth, the Streets Beneath, and from there to any other place within the underworld - but beware! The trip is fraught with danger and hardship, terror and anguish! OOOoooOOOoooOOO!

Zones of The Streets Beneath:

Lit ONLY SOMETIMES by otherworldly orbs or blue fire lanterns, the sickly glow of dreams, there is no earthly way of knowing.

The main road is paved (poorly) with good intentions, snakes through, sometimes is lost; beetle pulled troikas with skeleton nobles, ghoulish backpackers (human jerky, GOLP (good old long pig)), flickering street lights which hop about on chicken legs, flee or curl darkly when startled, eat bugs and rocks.

Upside-down castle hovering above a crater lake of ooze lit from within by stolen moons chained to the bottom like sea mines, giant bats hanging off belfries, love bright sweet things -

             A princess asleep in the basement-attic gently holding a glowing lavender moon, HER CHILD: she fell in love with a passing comet and when he departed on his long orbit, as comets must, she fell into a terrible sadness and with her, her kingdom. Her cries so moved the earth that it opened up and embraced her, pulling her castle down and placing the princess into a slumber. If you take the moon she will sigh and crumble to pale dust, but the comet will return, and he will be looking for his child...

              Guarded by the noble ghosts of her knights, all of whom love her deeply, find their skeletons crumpled inside their platemail and pierce them with their own glaives to dispel the ghosts, maddening chunks of starlight originally given by the comet to his mate as gifts, now roam the inverted halls, they blind and terrify.

The River of Bones also is here snaking through, maybe you'll see the ferry, Huck-Fin steamships chugging (zombie dogs power the waterwheels, motivated by big cartoon steak on a stick), translucent drowned riverfolk in chitin canoes, all on their way to the market, huge corpulent merchants sailing their well-laden barges.

The katamari of lost things, now stuck in a ditch as it sometimes is, little child katamari circling nervously the mother as it tries to heave itself over, forgotten desiccated ape tribe/funginids (fungus is always welcome in the underworld, part of an old deal)/fossil knights compete for resources aboard the rolling trove while it is still.

Dusty dusty desert, easily lost in the storms, gray dust in your teeth and eyes and ass, lost souls travelling in circles. A sandy whirlpool that leads down into one of the real Hells, dire vultures try to fly on featherless wings, stalagmites burst through the dust, smaller ones hide beneath a millimeter of the stuff, razor sharp, meditating damned cross-legged on tall poles on their last step of atonement before reincarnation. Perhaps you will see one open their eyes and rise into the dark roof, sublimating into pure white light. Beetlejuice sandworms?

The Crossroads, a massive rusted draw bridge of sinew and keratin arcs over the river, sometimes rises to let boats past, organic groaning as the ragged barely-flesh caretakers urge the organ-bridge on by poking sensitive bits, going into "the booth" (brainstem zone) and yanking on the medulla oblongata, competing toll-takers before the bridge and after, along the road, along the shore of the river offering fording vessels, gold is pointless down here, all want increasingly bizarre and precious things - memories, senses, names, beliefs and convictions, etc.

Swamplands of the bug warlocks, primordial mosquitos piloting enchanted amber mechsuits through the eons, immortal but trapped, weird bug magic involving blood and time, sucks your blood out from a distance and puts weird diseases in it and shoots it back into you, confused and angry, if you somehow show them evidence of their tiny, much-reduced modern day ancestors they will fall to their knees and weep weird mosquito tears.