Last session ended with The Friends drugging and hiding a body in a barrel. While we waited on another player, Siriel and Monkey interrogated him. This guy is a trained assassin, so he doesn’t much respect their physical torture (he’s trained for this stuff) but he lets the “demon magic” get in his head. Siriel later learned the thief is under the impression she’s a member of House Damanti, a tiefling-only noble house with a swirling rumors of demonic magic. It’s actually Monkey’s psionic visions. In addition, Balthazar disguises himself as the thief and threatens to ruin his reputation and get him kicked from the guild. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the thief relents for some hope of getting out of this alive. He tells them that he works for Ruxis Oculus (the smuggler branch of the thieves guild) and that everyone has orders to bring in the tiefling thief with a prosthetic horn (Siriel). They don’t learn any more than that.
This interrogation was a bit mid on my part, another instance of just not knowing enough to think on my feet. I’m not much an expert on how people react to torture, so I’m really not sure if the assassin should have been more freaked out by the strange messages in his head. I think this might have been a case of wanting an obstacle for the players for obstacles sake. In reality, the assassin actually didn’t spill all he could have to move the game forward to interesting places. Oh well, it will probably work out interestingly.
As a condition of his release, Monkey and Siriel demand he wait for half an hour every night at the church of Baron Paul in Luger del Aberton, so they might check in with him. This is cool, it gives them a potentially unreliable resource - lots of fun.
As part of my prep for this session I sat down and figured out how the guild actually works - the three arms and each role within. I should have done this ages ago, it’s quite interesting, and has potential for tons of player meddling.
There is some downtime stuff before The Friends head back into the dungeon. Too much, probably. I was a bit off my game today, bad at moving things along. Icoriol learns some interesting tidbits about the guild - Marquis Rosse is thinking of changing things sometime soon. Monkey and Siriel also learned of a store room of black market black powder in the sewers. They went to get it - doing a short hexcrawl through the sewers to grab it. I should have probably been more up front that this is a full game structure scenario, not the short trek they were expecting. We still followed the procedure, and there were no hang ups, but at the end a player said “That was boring” to me. I suppose that’s fair, I wonder how much of that is expectation management (the players expected something short but had to deal with a procedure) and how much of it is just how hexcrawls are (the moment to moment gameplay is simple (dull) in favour of generating interesting scenarios through the interaction of simple elements (maybe getting lost would have led to a more interesting scenario). Balthazar read some books in the church library to figure out what might be in the sarcophagus, but if the priest doesn’t know then he won’t find anything.
Eventually The Friends make their way down into the dungeon. They head back to the sarcophagus and start picking the locks one by one. There are six locks and each takes a dungeon turn. At the first encounter check (1-in-6 every 3 turns). I roll black puddings, and get the maximum encounter roll of 6. Black oozes seep forth from the bricks and quickly devolves into a fight.
The fight turned into a long slog. This system is really grating on me. Puddings don’t have morale, so they don’t flee, they fought to the bitter end. On paper it was actually a neat encounter - they cleverly used reach weapons so their armor stopped getting damaged. Balthazar passed around his summoned weapon to the fighters to stop them getting broken. The problem is it ate up about an hour when I already felt like I’d squandered 2, and it became apparent the players were going to win about halfway through. I don’t think this is bad on it’s own, because the encounter basically becomes a variable strength resource drain where the resolution mechanism is the combat rules. Those rules are very cumbersome for this purpose though.
After the fight, the party picks the rest of the locks (no encounters, thankfully) and pop them all open. At this point they’re expecting a boss fight, so they take combat stances and Balthazar uses his divine voice to open the coffin.
Instead, they find a bed of writhing worms and the corpse of a man. The corpse wriggles and rises slowly, the flesh revitalising as it does, until a grey-skinned square-jawed man stands in the coffin before them. It speaks with a raspy voice like thousands of little voices in one.
“My captors, in exchange for your service in freeing me, I shall spare you your lives. I am Uriel, the failed saint of worms. Now I am released, and upon the world can enact my bidding.”
The man quickly evaporates into a torrent of worms and makes for the door. The Friends try to stop the oceanic onslaught but they can’t catch every worm. By the time they slam the coffin closed and the worms subside, many have escaped.
Unsure of what they have unleashed on the world, The Friends press further on into the dungeon, still looking for the sceptre of Languard.
In retrospect the overall theme of this session was mismatch between game and player expectations. There was a little bit of frustration when the thief was immune to the basic torture method of the characters (the fact this is somewhat plausible in universe does not fix the problem). There was bordem and annoyance when they had to hexcrawl through the sewer to get what they wanted. There was a little deflation when the saint of worms wasn’t actually a boss (though the encounter was still kind of cool).
I suppose the only thing to do to move forward is clearly signpost things. I could have forewarned the interrogators (one of whom is an experience thief on par with the torturee, so she would know this) that their thief won’t respond well to physical torture. I should have just told the players that retrieving the kegs is a whole game structure - it’s a little gamey but I think it makes for a smoother experience. I should have been more awake to make the downtime stuff smoother and have more time in the dungeon.
Another aspect is some details I wasn’t clear on were clearly made up on the spot, and though I believe those details to be accurate and non-contrived, they still came out of nowhere. The thief being resistant to physical torture makes sense, but still feels a bit lame when it’s randomly sprung on you after you try to enact a plan you thought of. I’ve been on the player end of that in my thursday game and it doesn’t feel great even if it makes sense. I should have thought a little more about details, especially what the thief needed to say, the aspects of his personality and background that really sell the resisting torture. This guy is a trained assassin and I clung too hard to irrelevant details to try to sell that and it didn’t end up working.
Even though the session itself felt a bit bleh, there are some neat established details that will come back. The thief contact is an interesting resource because he’s definitely plotting against the friends even as he’s being useful. The saint of worms is now out there somewhere (though I’m not sure his schemes will be realised before the game ends). The quest for the sceptre of languard nears completion - it must because there are only about 4 or 5 rooms left of this level of the dungeon (though they might explore the lower level first, I’ve learned my lesson about 70 rooms dungeons).