The Friends are back in Fangmire, where the game started. Things are different now. I did a pretty bad job establishing the town when they first started, so there isn’t much to contrast it to, but the town is now quiet, uninviting.
The Friends next move is to head in the direction of Solemnity, but they are unsure of their exact route. Before their arrival in town, they used a sending spell to contact the baron Amecouth, their major ally. He tells them of a strange curse that has befallen the Llamontca Wode, and that they should avoid it at all costs. The eastern road goes through the forest, so The Friends are suddenly unsure of what to do. They decide to visit Rantusk, the alchemist and someone they know in town, to see if he has any goods before they move on.
Only Rantusk doesn’t recognise them, and seems entirely hostile. Some quick breaking in and interrogation reveals he is a Doppelganger! In fact, many people in town are Doppelgangers. They’re staging some kind of takeover, and the mayor is in on it. Only she knows their true aims.
While investigating around town, they find Rantusk’s assistant, who has not been replaced. (It would have been so cool if she was a doppelganger deliberately tricking them, but I pulled this on them a few games ago so it felt cheap to do it again - sometimes simpler is better). She tells them of the troubles in town starting not too long ago.
To get to the bottom of it, The Friends head to the mayors house and sneak in. The house itself was generated on the fly with Wallet Dungeons. It was… okay. Wallet Dungeons itself was good for generating an explorable place on the fly. It just felt so pointless.
An obstacle like this didn’t feel worth the time it took to set it up. Obstacles for obstacles sake is a trap I often fall into. Would have been better overall for sneaking into the mayors house to be somewhat trivial so we can get to the good stuff. In the moment I was too worried about the mayors defenses seeming stupidly lackluster to allow the characters to just infiltrate like it was nothing. In all fairness, maybe they could have ambushed her in the street or something. A subpar plan shouldn’t result in subpar gameplay though.
The mayor tells them of a giant being grown in the swamp - the same kind Lobsang is trapped inside of after the battle for lobstown. Gruffie Mayhem let The Friends know of the clay giants affinity for swamps like the prioro marsh.
The Friends move into the swamp to track down the giant. After a brief encounter with some will-o’-wisps, they find the giant in the forest. Doppelgangers guard the egg which is perched just beyond the treeline of the forest. Using the trees as cover, Siriel decides to do some sneaky shooting. Guns are loud, and so I figure it’s only a matter of time before they find her. We did some quick rolling to see how many doppelgangers she managed to kill before they do. I think it was around 6. When they find her, they call to the giant, and the fight is on.
That’s where we ended the session, low on time. In the moment I remember this feeling like a waste of time session but in retrospect this is pretty good. I think it was just that I knew more interesting stuff is waiting across the map. The game is torn between a sandbox and a narrative game, and it’s kind of drawing out the weaknesses of both. The narrative game relies on the players doing quite specific things, which the sandbox makes more difficult, and since they’re waiting on the narrative stuff, the sandbox just feels like a chore.
The will-o’-wisp encounter is something I want to focus on briefly because it was a new type of design I was trying out and it kind of backfired. I’ve been toying with the idea for a while of making undead, especially incorporeal undead, immune to weapons. I hate that you can cut a shadow with a sword to kill it, that’s so lame. But I also respect that monsters exist in these games to be killed. As such, each undead has it’s own weakness, which me and a friend came up with. I don’t remember the will-o’-wisps weakness, I think it was being reminded of their former life? Either way, the way it played out was that the spellcasters were able to damage them and the characters with non-magic weapons were just useless. This is not exactly what I was going for.
I’m still thinking about how best to solve this. I don’t necessarily think it matters that some characters are useless against certain monsters. Having monsters not contribute to XP means that players don’t have to fight monsters if they don’t want. If fights were quicker perhaps it wouldn’t matter. I also failed to establish these rules to the players, so they got blindsided by suddenly not being able to do anything. The fun of these kind of hyper-resistant monsters is learning about them and preparing strategically beforehand, not finding out they’re randomly immune. I should have telegraphed better.