Thanks to you!
My first series of blog posts will be ongoing session reports of the adventures I run. I must offer thanks to diregrizzlybear, whose own session reports prompted me to do this. And it seems I must also thank Jenx by extension, who seems to have burdened diregrizzlybear with the idea in the first place.
Another thank you should be extended to bread.wizard, whose new blog begins with a review of the adventure I am currently playing. It was helpful to read someone else's thoughts before I dived in. He was also the one who recommended I try this module in the first place. Thank you bread.wizard!
Why post at all?
That is a valid inquiry. I would like to:
- Keep a record of the adventures I run.
- Think about how I run tabletop RPGs more concretely.
- Give myself something fun to write about.
Thinking about my relation to RPGs more concretely is something I’m especially looking forward to getting out of this project. I have read plenty of material talking about running adventure games in the abstract. As I mentioned in my intro post, Knock! is one of my favourite OSR-related publications.
However, most of the time I’m reading other peoples’ thoughts on how they’re running their games, rather than reflecting on how I run my games. Moreover, I don’t run enough games in the first place and I’m hoping that this project will encourage me to play more!
Adventure 1 – The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen (Black Sword Hack)
For my first foray
into this vein of posting, I will be attempting to cover the events of my ongoing
Black
Sword Hack adventure. I am using a pre-written module called “The Darkness Over
Nijmauwrgen” (from the Chaos Crier
issue #0, bundled with the Black Sword Hack Ultimate Chaos Edition Kickstarter
campaign).
The adventure is a gloomy Lovecraftian city crawl that seems absolutely stuffed with things and people to poke at and irritate in various ways. It has 41 keyed locations, a rather nice city map with a grid overlay, and contains roughly 20 pages. It seemed very cool, and I was encouraged by the introduction, provided below.
For heroes of levels 2-5. An urban crawl with only one plot: a disaster waiting to happen. Depending on the actions of the characters, the adventure can go in several directions. The different events, rumours, and the results of their exploration will quickly give them an overview of the situation; from there, they can decide if they want to get involved or not, with who, and on which side. GM, DON’T PREP! Just read this once, and have fun improvising the actions of the various parties in reaction to what the characters do.
Sounds good to me. I always like a low-prep module. Though as you’ll see in the following posts, I struggled to follow that advice.
One last note on tone and graphic content in the adventure reports. The Black Sword Hack is an adventure game that aims to emulate the dark fantasy of Sword & Sorcery novels from the past. I'm not really familiar with many of those books, although recently I have read Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné and Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. The content in those books can be quite violent and so the sessions we play may include some grisly scenes. I'll try to keep it to a reasonable level but be aware that some posts may include violence.
The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #1
The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #2
The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #3
The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #4
The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #5
Cheers,
Feirsteax
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