Your Scent Has Attracted A Bear

Monday Night Murderers, Session 1.

The current plan is to run through my first starter adventure, then fast forward to them arriving in a port town where another of the zines takes place. It's a whistle stop tour of my current Zungeons (Zines that are Dungeons, just go with it), with a few locations from various group projects (Bronze Lands, Eastlake, etc) airlifted into a new context. All of these can be found at my Itch page if you'd like to follow along. We're playing three hour sessions Monday nights, using this three hour No-AI medieval compilation as a rough timer and background audio.

This is my normal duo of Deni (she/her) my spouse and Scott (he/they) my three-decades-long gaming cohort, augmented with his partner Emma (any/all) and our new friend Itty (they/them). With Deni and Scott, our trio games tend to feel explosively fast and dramatic once we get cooking. We have a lingua franca between us that feels more like a theatrical Actual Play with "yes and" narrative building and dynamic, out-of-the-box action sequences. The big challenge here will be ingratiating two new players into this "big personality" playstyle. Itty has a theatre background which will definitely help; and Emma's willing to put their back into playing, which will definitely help.

It's a balanced group: Bobbie the fighter (Deni) / Rook the thief (Scott) / Z the cleric (Emma) / Aesa the magic user (Itty). We begin with some light background improv, and the players build a network of childhood stories together that give them solid reasons to travel together, and some hooks for later if necessary; but the players are genuinely enthusiastic, and ready to focus on more diagetic character building, so we press on.

I wrote an adventure explicitly for newer referees, with boxed text and a simplistic, easy-to-follow scenario. I've received decent enough feedback about these dungeons, but already I'm seeing things I'd like to revise, which is always a good thing. We begin with our foursome in a city they've grown up in, tasked with rescuing a princess they recall fondly from their childhood. Each player has a chance to recall or act out a memory of Princess Elsinore, which helps her come alive and gets the party strongly motivated to get moving. The last of her knights, Sir Daphnir, provides from much needed equipment and gold, and the party wastes no time purchasing additional supplies for their trip.

This game is ran in my old school cobbled-together heartbreaker / craphack I'm testing out, because of course I am. A thing I'm trying: each player starts with a horse, which already has completely shifted how everyone approaches hirelings and travel. I provided the six pregens from the adventure as local friends of theirs, and each player recruited one more person, such that they could ride on horses in tandem. I suspect, as they inevitably add more and more soldiers to their retinue, they'll be sinking more gold into horses and wagons than in a typical modern-day game as I've experienced them; and I'm excited for this as a new vector of play, and an obvious answer to those early "where do we put all this gold" questions that come from successful adventurers. Also an excellent opportunity to instill an appropriate hatred of horse thieves.

Anyway.

The party quickly treks north with a landmark-map drawn by Sir Daphnir (provides rerolls on getting lost), understanding that in three mornings they should arrive at the mouth of a great cave, where they might find a Sunstone which is key to Elsinore's freedom. Not long after they begin their journey, however; trouble strikes. The party now numbers two fighters, two magic-users, two clerics, a thief, and a goblin. As one fighter, Bobbie, surveys the surrounding hills, she notices five Drek-Men watching from a shallow hill just below her, each armed with ragged slings and covered in sooty, filthy rags. Bobbie attempted a parlay, but they were not having it (reaction roll 5 +2 charisma mod -2 nasty drek men = 5 = fight time), and immediately started barking and threatening the party.

They never even had the chance to attack. Javelins took out two almost instantly, followed by a thief's arrow, and two magic missiles whose effect I described as "You ever see Scanners? that. Like a stick of dynamite was placed in their chest cavity." Their haul: 11 gold pieces, two dead rats, and a yoyo, excitedly claimed by Aesa. Amusements now in tow, thus began a bizarre conversation about how to dispose of bodies which led to some utterly strange rolls; suffice to say, buzzards picked the bodies clean, and a failed attempt to flatten them with a giant boulder(?I guess?) led to a giant dick-shaped rock jammed immovably into the valley path, and horrid bodies being picked by scavengers through the night. Aesa issued a "challenge" to newcomers to the giant phallus; Rook marked the new landmark on the map. Miraculously, despite the horrid stench and campfire, they slept peacefully through the night.

Noontime the next day, they found themselves rounding a jagged rock in an autumnal scrubland to find a particularly well-timed random encounter: four bandits arguing over their recent haul. I ran through some of their dialogue, as Rook the thief waited for a heated moment in the argument to scuttle closer (advantage on a 2-in-6 move silently check yielded a 2 and 5). This was all well and good; he then attempted to throw a pebble to distract the party for an ambush, so that he could attempt to steal a bandit's crossbow (which was siting right next to him, and frankly just not a good idea). We agreed on the same basic premise as the "Cock Rock Incident:"

6: a perfect result, they move to investigate 4-5: they're distracted for a moment 2-3: the pebble lands noiselessly 1: something embarrassing and stupid happens.

For the second time that night, Rook rolls a 1; the pebble hits him straight in the forehead. He dives for the floor, and I give him a raw attempt to hide, 2-in-6; miraculously he disappears into the fall leaves, and the bandits resume their argument (over whether one of them can read, and whether there were geese in this forest)(there are not geese in this forest). A few dangerous rolls later, and Rook closes on the party, bursting from the leaves to put Elsinore's +1 silver stiletto into one side of "no way he can read"'s neck and out the other.

I give the other players a 2-in-6 chance to act; Bobbie rolls a 2, and her two fighters both let loose long distance javelins. One pins "ain't no geese in this forest" to the ground where he sat; this caused "are too geese in this forest" to leap to his feet, placing his skull directly in the other javelin's flightpath, leaving him pinned standing, dumbfounded, and dead.

The fourth bandit, Jandt ("I can read, hand me a book I'll prove it"), surrendered immediately and asked if he could keep his share of the loot and just quietly disappear; instead, they let him keep all of his loot, plus the book he wanted, and offered him a job. Finding himself suddenly unemployed, he happily joined the party as the fifth half-share of treasure. Rook then traded Jandt his shortbow (common in the bronze age farming duchy) for a crossbow (basically a raygun), and learned Jandt was from Lumil, off the Sapphire Coast - where with any luck the party will head in a few weeks of play. I'd quietly been hoping I'd be able to lead them organically to where one of my zines took place, and slapping a bit of personality on Random Bandit #4 did the trick. I can already tell he's going to be the party's Pet NPC for as long as he survives, which, we'll see!

Anyway, 140gp and 10 books of varying values are recovered, and that's where we choose to pause for this week. Bit of a slow start this session, everyone getting together snacks and figuring out seating, who'll bring what next time, how the system will flow, simple things like that. Still, it feels like we have a helluva lot of fun and got some real work in. Only later in the evening did Deni remark:

"I just realized, we're all young would-be adventurers from this small town, and within 48 hours of the first time leaving our parents' houses we've killed eight people."

Monday Night Murderers Session 1 Body Count