The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #2

Mystery and Mischief in Taineri Manor (played 05/03/2024)

System: The Black Sword Hack
Adventure: The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen (from The Chaos Crier issue #0)
Players: Faaya (Capingreen), Kvam (Janitor911)
GM: Me (Feirsteax)
Session length: 2h ish

Figure 1: The duke’s manor. A chopped up, one-floor version of the map from Ben Milton's The Waking of Willowby Hall.

A Royal Conundrum

Another stack of paperwork has arrived, courtesy of the Black Sun. Nijmauwrgen’s bureaucrats seem to have the average attention span of a pickled herring. Four times I’ve had to complete the same blasted form. A pox on this city and its arcane regulations!

Just when I thought today couldn't get any worse, I was accosted by a most peculiar pair of visitors. A hardy, dwarfish looking fellow who exuded a rank, salty aroma like the tooth of a mermaid’s comb and a much more elegant lady with a pale complexion who seemed to derive pleasure in tripping me up with words. Eventually, astonishingly, they invited me to join them to a midnight masquerade at the duke’s manor.

Pah! What self-respecting cartographer would be seen mingling with such a bizarre bifurcation? Yet, one wonders who else might be invited. A wealthy bureaucrat with influence in the city's affairs, perhaps? It might be worth my while, and my coin, to make a good impression. Smooth things over and get my magnificent balloon back in the clouds – with this smear of a city finally beneath me.

I’m already considering what I wish to wear to the event. Something sprightly and colourful I should think. Oh, Julovern, what fine mess have you embroiled yourself in now?

- Julovern, Royal Geographer

Report

At the end of our last session, Kvam and Faaya had just entered the grand hall of the manor and been introduced to Duke Taineri, who seemed to vanish in a puff of dramatic smoke. His factotum, Igor, welcomed them to the manor and encouraged them to enjoy some of the freshly prepared food and fruit punch that was being served.

Duke Taineri and his manor are given a pretty brief description in the original module. On the spot, I decided to rename his manservant Igor, and based his personality on the recurring character from the Discworld Series. One of my players is a big Discworld fan and caught on right away, it was a good laugh roleplaying him.

The more major modification I made was to prepare for myself a keyed map for the manor, which in the adventure doesn’t have any map at all. To save reinventing the wheel, I stole the map from Ben Milton’s The Waking of Willowby Hall and mashed it up a little with some random tables from Brad Kerr’s Demon Driven to the Maw and an old AD&D 2e module I found called Night of the Vampire by Richard Baker.

In the end, most of what I prepared wasn’t used. The players barely got through any rooms during the session and only triggered two random encounters. It was still extremely useful to have everything laid out with keyed rooms to refer to in reaction to player decisions, but I think I just didn’t give the scenario quite enough time to unfold properly. But I’ll get into all that more at the bottom of the post.

The party spent the whole session inside the manor. There was a midnight feast being prepared and various interesting characters from the city were present to mingle with. One of the guests was dressed in an elaborate beggar’s costume and was acting strangely aloof all evening.

Later, when the party were shown to the guest rooms and given a change of clothing appropriate for the dinner, this false beggarman stumbled into their room and confided in them that he could not remember his own identity. The only thing he could remember clearly was that he was meant to meet Sfen that day at the Black Sturgeon Inn but had been forced to flee for his life the night before. Could this be Alcantor?

I threw a handful of NPCs from the module into the manor and prepped some conversation topics with them. I included a few rumours and hooks in there to slip into the conversations to entice the players with threads to investigate later. I’m very happy with how this worked out, overall. The inclusion of Alcantor may have been a bit heavy handed, but I wanted them to engage with some of the core content of the module, so I threw him in there.

Some other key characters that the players interacted with:

Bonifacio – A rough looking chap with a bony ridge that ran the length of his shaven head. A blade for hire.

Zvoorinius – A nervous, androgenous figure who seemed interested in Alcantor. They suggested Kvam should go to the One-Eyed Cat “after the cat meows” and ask for The Gray.

Doctor Dostoyez – A mysterious woman wearing a lion’s mane for a hood. Seemed to be very supportive of the Black Sun in general and had distractingly shiny black hair.

Julovern had been talking with Kvam for a while when the conversation moved to the matter of the Black Sun’s authority. Not wanting to rock the boat as a foreign diplomat in the city of Nijmauwrgen, Julovern was very reticent to comment. Eventually he put an end to the conversation as Kvam pressed the matter, suggesting that he did not want to discuss sedition with common riffraff.

I used some random tables to generate the appearance and personality quirks of each guest, which made them all memorable.

Bonifacio is just a hireling, but I didn’t really make that clear to the players. I will try to rectify that in the next session and have him offer his services explicitly. Zvoorinius is with the Thieves Guild and is interested in Kvam’s potential. Dostoyez is described in the original module as an occultist who knows a lot about demons and things. I decided they were also an agent of the Black Sun. The shiny hair was meant to be a tell – it’s a wig and if the players looked closely, they would have discovered. Unfortunately, neither of them did.

The players’ interactions with Julovern have mainly consisted of mockery and deceit. When the conversation with Kvam went badly, I realised this should probably be reflected in his reactions towards the party from then on. They are still expecting to leave on his fantastical balloon, but this may complicate matters for them.

As the night wore on and the pre-dawn twilight crept over the horizon, strange things started to occur in the manor. Fish heads spilled out of every drawer and cupboard during the dinner. Ghostly conversations were heard behind doors that led to empty rooms. Finally, a terrifying half-man half-octopus type monster manifested in the Great Hall and began to attack people. The party dispatched with it very quickly, but the panic had set in, and the guests all fled in fright.

The duke at this stage intervened and asked the party, as well as Alcantor, to come to his crypt and speak with them. He explained the manor had been cursed with these fishy apparitions and monstrous outbursts. He thanked the party for dispatching with the beast. The duke suspected that the Black Sun’s leader, Sarakasas the Penitant, may be behind these events. Perhaps The Black Sun saw the duke as an obstacle to their total domination of the city.

At this point I engaged in a bit of an exposition dump. The vampire duke has probably lived in the city for hundreds of years, so he would likely remember the story of Sarakasas the Skinner, an evil pirate who terrorised the coasts a hundred years ago. It seemed more than a coincidence to the duke that the Archpriest of the Black Sun and this ancient pirate shared a name.

Alcantor and the duke spoke briefly about the nature of his memory loss. The duke said Alcantor was afflicted by a curse called Mnemophagia, but that he could cure it. However, the duke would need a strand of Kahnvisser’s beard to do so. He suggested they check his ancient burial grounds to the west of the city.

The session ended with the duke imploring the party and Alcantor to help him escape the manor along with his sarcophagus, and safely deliver it outside the city gates. Suddenly, there was banging on the front door and the noise of templars demanding the duke come out without a fight. Luckily, there was an access to the sewers from the basement of the manor which would allow them all to slip away quickly. The party, Alcantor, the duke and Igor took their chance and escaped into the sewer, dragging the sarcophagus along with them.

There is a lot here that wasn’t explicitly in the original module. One thing that was in it was the duke’s proposition to escape the city along with his sarcophagus. I took that and came up with some relevant reasoning as to why he would want to do this and had him propose it to the party when the midnight feast went wrong. I had made sure it would go wrong by using a dungeon turn system with random haunting tables and other escalation mechanics adapted from The Waking of Willowby Hall.

After I’d finished, I realised I had pretty much railroaded them into this escape into the sewers. That felt a bit annoying to me, but I decided that next session I could have them emerge onto the beach and decide what they wanted to do from there. They would have the option of continuing the plan and helping the duke escape, or just ditching him and figuring out something else to do.

Thoughts

This session went okay. It had some nice NPC conversations in it and some exploration of an interesting manor location. But I’m not entirely happy with how it went. I’m somewhat conflicted about some aspects of how I ran it.

On the one hand, I felt I rushed towards a conclusion before the party got to properly explore the manor. I was paranoid about getting enough plot development done in this session. In my fear, I pushed some developments along that could’ve been better paced. On top of this, I’d realised that we were two sessions in and there had been no combat encounters, and I was worried the players would find that boring. In the end, I forced a combat encounter that felt cursory and a bit pointless. The fishman (a monster from the module called a Deep One) didn’t even get to act before it had its head cleaved in two.

However, one of the reasons I thought to force escalation was that I was worrying that the session was getting boring. That suggests to me two things. I may have dialled the random encounter dice down a bit too low, and I may not have included enough interesting situations in the manor for the party to feel driven to keep exploring. By forcing a few random encounters, I hoped to make things interesting again.

All the conventional OSR-ish wisdom says that you should prep situations, not plots. I did try to do this but now that I think about it, I clearly had it in my head that the players would get asked by Taineri at the end of the session to go into the sewers. That probably pushed me towards forcing escalation when otherwise I wouldn’t have felt it necessary. If I’d have been okay with just letting the party miss that potential outcome, I may have been more inclined to just let more turns progress without incident.

Another potential issue was that my random event table probably sucked a bit. Looking back on it, “fish heads spill out of drawers” is a funny image but gives the players basically nothing to do except pick up a mop and start cleaning.

So, I’m leaning towards the conclusion that the problem was a combination of my desire to force the players towards the "Taineri Escape Plan" session finale and a lack of worthwhile stuff to play about with in the location I'd prepped. Interesting!

To check this, I should ask my players for feedback. Did they think the manor was an engaging place to explore before all hell broke loose and forced them into the sewers?

An interesting thought experiment. I’m glad I took the time to write this out. It’s helped me gain clarity on some of the feelings I had coming out of the session.

 

 

Critical fumble,

Feir

The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #1

A rocky landing in Nijmauwrgen (played 27/02/2024)

System: The Black Sword Hack
Adventure: The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen (from The Chaos Crier issue #0)
Players: Faaya (Capingreen), Kvam (Janitor911)
GM: Me (Feirsteax)
Session length: 2h30m ish

Figure 1: Path taken by players during session 1.
Morning path = Red; Afternoon path = Green; Night Path = Blue

Moonaagdag, 3rd of Lathspell

What a miserable start to the year. This morning, we set sail from The Pictlands with gold glittering in our eyes. Tonight, we’re stuck on the battered bridge of the Babaselem, beached for the foreseeable and the last of her rum dripping down my chin. A huge storm—one of the biggest—snapped our mast in two. We’ll be stranded here for at least a week.

As for our little operation... Well, that idea may as well be drowned now, too. Two of the crew haven’t been seen since we first crashed into this grey hole of a city. Alcantor is nowhere to be found. And the Black Sun’s goons are breathing down my neck. This is messier than a Pictish bog.

And now I’ve dumped Faaya and Kvam into this boggy mess. Two newcomers. I could tell they’d jump at any opportunity to reinvent themselves. Aye, both fleeing their own past. That wee Kvam blends in with the rest of them—a stout, gruff boy from the wilds—but Faaya’s another story altogether. “Exiled from a crumbling empire,” apparently. Her clothes look more expensive than the rest of the crew’s combined. I asked them to join me on a grand plan, in the end it was more of a wild goose chase. What a buffoon...

Ah well, there’s a few drops left. I’ll drink and forget the rest.

- Sfen, Captain of the Babaselem

Report

The players started on the Babaselem (loc. 38). They introduced themselves to Sfen and told tales of their previous escapades. Kvam lived for three years in the wilderness, surviving solely on Troll fat. Faaya came from a vampire society, and in a fit of ice-cold rage murdered her would-be partner before fleeing the empire altogether.

This was my way of introducing the characters while also providing an explanation for starting them at level two – in Black Sword Hack, each significant adventure equates to a level. In this case, I asked the players to come up with an event that shaped their character’s life and told them this would constitute their first level advancement.

Sfen invited them to meet Alcantor. He promised the party rewards and opportunities, but also warned of dangers. Alcantor is plotting rebellion in Nijmauwrgen and has many hidden allies. Sfen showed them the way to The Black Sturgeon Inn (loc. 1) where Alcantor would be waiting. Along the way, Kvam and Faaya took note of some of the other locations and stopped for a chat with Julovern the royal geographer outside his Fantastical Airship (loc. 39).

I felt like I was struggling to come up with a reason for the players to join Sfen. They accepted his invite out of a lack of anything else to do and seemed suspicious of him in general. I suggested that Alcantor’s plan of rebellion could be lucrative to the party if successful. They weren’t terribly convinced but went along with it anyway.

Alcantor was nowhere to be found, he fled the evening prior and in the morning his room was ransacked by shadowy figures. Sfen and Baart, who worked at the inn, were discussing this in the open. They decided to go somewhere more secluded to figure out what to do next. They walked across the city to the Secret Garden (loc. 21). Baart feared retribution from the Temple of the Black Sun, who Alcantor was plotting to overthrow. Sfen said he was a coward and stormed off. Kvam and Faaya were left to their own devices.

I had Sfen suggest they go to the Secret Garden because I didn’t really know how to handle this conversation and was trying to buy time. In the end it worked okay because the location was cool. After the NPCs left the party alone, they had some fun interacting with the shrine and exploring the area.

After Kvam drank from an enchanted pond in the garden, they decided to head back to the Babaselem. They encountered three inebriated worshippers of the Temple of the Black Sun who shouted blessings at them from afar. After Kvam growled at them and brandished his Iwisa, they lurched hurriedly away. Closer to the port, a scrawny old man handed them an invitation to the duke’s midnight party at Taineri Manor (loc. 10), before slinking away into the crowd again.

I had difficulty figuring out how to run city navigation. I thought describing travel square by square would be difficult as each square seemed indistinct from the next. If I used the keyed location as descriptions, I’d risk overloading the players with information. I winged it and decided to roll one random encounter per travel, making a ruling on the fly to reduce to zero for shorter excursions or increase to two for longer journeys.

They finally returned to the port as night was falling. The city streets were quiet. Entering the Babaselem, they found Sfen drunk and despondent, empty bottles of rum lying round him (see diary note above). He told them two of his crew were missing and he had no leads on Alcantor.

I couldn’t think of anything more for Sfen to say but luckily the adventure text mentioned two missing crew members that I’d forgotten to tell the players about. Adapting NPC conversations to shifting contexts in the story is difficult.

They invited Julovern to the duke’s party. The manor was huge, and Igor the factotum showed them in. The duke stood at the top of a grand staircase and a dramatic bolt of lightning lit up the room. Maniacal laughter echoed through the great hall and the duke vanished in a puff of smoke. This is where we ended tonight’s session.

I was happy with the way this ended, it neatly wrapped up the session in around 3 hours. What will happen at the manor? The adventure text is vague on this point, I may try to hack together a scenario for it.

Thoughts

The adventure went well. My players enjoyed exploring the city and finding different threads and clues. I was nervous since it had been a long while since I’d GM’d anything and I always find city scenarios stressful. However, once we settled into it the time flew by and we had a lot of fun.

At first, I thought the adventure hooks weren’t very compelling for the players to follow. They immediately find their contact is missing and there are no clues on where to find him. But reflecting on it now a few days later, a dead end can encourage the players to stop, think about their situation and explore other areas. If the answer is spelled out in front of them with massive signposts, they’ll have no reason to look around elsewhere. So having a dead end can be a creative instrument for play.

The adventure explicitly tells the GM, “Don’t prep!” But my nerves got the better of me and I ended up prepping a whole load of extraneous materials. Most of it was setting information from the back half of The Black Sword Hack book, to give a bit of detail to the adventure’s surrounding regions and decide what languages were spoken. Almost none of it ended up relevant to the session, though. I completely forgot about the languages and just assumed that everyone in the city was fluent in Thyrenian (this system’s equivalent to Common).

Next week, the party will be exploring a vampire’s manor for a midnight masquerade. The adventure has only a line or two dedicated to this, and again I find myself prepping despite the advice to the contrary. I have already prepped a small scenario for it, cribbing from other “party in a fancy house” adventures that I had on my computer. I stole the floorplan from The Waking of Willowby Hall and a bunch of tables from Demon Driven to the Maw and mashed them together with a handful of Nijmauwrgen NPCs and some reskinning. For session three, I promise I will try to play the adventure in the prep-light spirit in which it was given!

 

 

Thank you for reading,

Feirsteax