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