The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #3

Escape from Taineri Manor (played 12/03/2024)

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: 3h ish

Figure 1: Path taken by players for session 3.
Red in black channel – Sewer escape; Light blue – Sarcophagus rafting

Note: The intro to this post might suggest that this session was extremely grim in tone. In fact, most of the session was fun and silly. It was only towards the end where things took a turn for the gruesome, but it was the most dramatic moment of the evening, so I decided to open with it. CW: violence, blood.

The Assassin

“Did you hear that?” Klees gripped the hilt of his guisarme and looked to Hans.

They hurried down the cobbled street and ducked into an alley, their tunics heavy in the rain. Before them lay a Templar, decapitated in a puddle of blood. Klees felt his stomach churn. “Who’s there?” His eyes quickly scanned across the alley, but he could see nothing. Nothing, save for an unnatural haze by the corpse where the rain seemed to warp and dance.

A slender figure emerged from the shadows and the glint of a blade flashed in the dark. “Help me!” she cried, her voice strangely devoid of emotion.

“Fear not, maiden!” Hans stepped forward and reached out his hand.

“Hans! We can’t trust her!” Klees gasped. He blinked as he struggled to focus on the strange, shifting blur. It lurched towards him and Klees knew, with numb certainty, that it meant him harm.

“Klees, she’s in danger!” pleaded Hans. Klees was stunned by his partner’s foolishness. He opened his mouth to protest but found that he could not speak. He felt a searing pain and heard the unmistakeable sound of blade piercing flesh. The dreaded haze shimmered before him; a line of crimson streaked within it. Terror consumed him as he recognised the blood-soaked outline of a sword jutting impossibly from his neck.

Klees choked as his partner spun around. A slender blade slashed across his throat and Hans crumpled. Draped in the garb of an unknown kingdom, the slender figure held out her dagger and let the rain wash away the blood.

Report

This session took a turn towards the end. A random encounter roll sparked a great moment of emergent narrative that completely turned the players’ plans upside down. It was fantastic and thematic, the first time the game felt close to the Sword & Sorcery novels that were its inspiration. But I’ll not jump ahead just yet.

Last session, the party set off into the sewers beneath Nijmauwrgen with the vampire duke Taineri, his manservant Igor and an amnesiac revolutionary called Alcantor.

Side note: This adventure has a bizarre mix of characters – It’s quite fun and gonzo! The tone is different from what the introduction to the Black Sword Hack rulebook suggests (“Doomed princes, cunning vagabonds and greedy mercenaries…”). I knew when I read the adventure module that it was aiming for a Lovecraftian twist on the dark fantasy stuff, with some absurd elements thrown in for fun. I had underestimated the difference in tone that this would create. This isn’t meant as a criticism, more an observation and a note to myself that I’d like to run an adventure some time that really sticks close to the style suggested in the core rulebook.

To be fair, the introduction did also say that “these inspirations are merely a starting point” and that the game master should draw inspiration “from every source they deem appropriate.” So perhaps I’m being a bit rigid in my interpretation here.

Taineri guided the party through two or three lengths of sewer channels towards the large refuse basin that spilled onto the harbour. The tide was high and the sewerage had risen to about chest height, forcing the party to climb atop of the sarcophagus and propel it through the sewer like a raft.

Along the way, they heard strange scrabbing noises beneath them. Tentacles and claws were reaching up from below the surface! Thankfully they got away safely and were greeted with a reassuring view of the harbour bathed in a cool pre-dawn glow.

Since I felt that I’d railroaded them last session by forcing them into the sewers, I wanted to give them a chance to make a choice about how to proceed. I had Taineri direct them to the nearest exit and from there they could decide where to go next.

I rolled two encounters with two Deep Ones each and wasn’t sure how to play it, so I gave them a warning with the splashing of tentacles and claws and let them figure out what to do from there. The idea to row on top of a sarcophagus is of course ridiculous, but I thought it was funny. The duke had already shown some magical abilities so maybe this is just another one of his powers!

A discussion ensued about what to do with the sarcophagus. Getting it out of the city would be difficult. The moors to the west were said to be full of savage monsters, and Julovern’s flying machine was still earthbound due to an abundance of paperwork. Going through the city would mean carrying it through crowded streets and Alcantor would have to part ways with them, since the Black Sun’s goons could be looking for him.

Eventually they had a bright idea – they would raft the sarcophagus across the bay! Once they got to the Babaselem (loc. 38), they could bring it aboard and stow it away in the hold until they figured out what to do.

This was the decision point and scheming moment that I had felt I’d deprived the party of at the end of the last session. I’m happy with how it played out. I totally didn’t expect them to try sailing it!

The party’s relaxing journey across the bay was a sharp contrast to the horror and sludge of the sewers. They finally had a chance to take in some of the views of the bay. To the west, high on the moors outside the city, they saw a set of stone steps leading up to the top of a hill. There were four stone doors set into the hillside and some small gravestones (loc. 8). To the north, beneath the lighthouse, a half dozen small currachs were making their way over to the jagged island off the coast (loc. 41).

Figure 2: A stone tumulus (loc. 8) set into a hillside on the moors. The party could see this view from their journey across the bay.

To narrate the journey, I used a simple weather procedure that I came across the other day in Knock! #4 (Weather Dice, p. 122). It was quite lightweight and intuitive and helped me describe the journey with a bit of colour, as well as providing some potential weather effects.

Another thing I was tracking was time of day. After running my first session I asked in the OSR Discord server if anyone had any advice for running urban exploration, since I had found it difficult. Sahh suggested I could use some guidance from Kelvin Green’s Terror in the Streets. The highlighted segment below was what I went with. I just adjudicated roughly when a turn was significant enough to warrant crossing off a four-hour chunk of day. Simple and effective.

 

 

Eventually, they arrived at the port. A crowd of curious onlookers had gathered to watch their coming into dock. Faaya dispersed the tension and asked the crew of the Babaselem to help them pull the sarcophagus ashore.

Here, the Reaction Roll was very useful. Determining NPCs reactions to the bizarre actions of the PCs would have been quite tough without it. I rolled a 2d6 and optionally modified it with a +2 or -2 depending on the circumstances. I’d optionally combine it with a mien from d6666 Miens to help me roleplay the interaction. These tools have been invaluable, guiding NPC interactions throughout the session.

Sfen had many questions for the party. He was drunk on rum again and demanded to know what was going on. The party promised him that the duke would pay him 100 gold for letting his sarcophagus stay aboard, so he didn’t protest for long.

At this point, the party were exhausted and covered in night soil, so they decided to take a long rest aboard the ship. They slept all the way through to the next morning. Kvam had a fitful rest, his dreams visited by a tall, many-eyed goddess. She pointed to the bay, and he turned to see a horde of Deep Ones emerging from it. All about him, Nijmauwrgen lay in ruins as the fishmen overrun the city. All but the lighthouse, standing tall on the crag.

This dream was the effect of drinking the water from the Secret Garden in session 1. Two sessions later, the payoff finally arrived! The player seemed shaken and worried by the experience, too. Great!

When they awoke, Kvam told Faaya of his dream and expressed his fear at having to spend any more time in the city. Alcantor had slipped away in the night, but thankfully he had already told them where to find him if they ever found a cure to his amnesia curse.

The party wanted to get this sarcophagus out of the city and decided to check in on Julovern to see if his machine was ready to fly again. But when they left the ketch and stepped onto the harbour, they saw a huge commotion outside. Templars were scattered along the docks, one placed strategically every few hundred yards, directing everyone into the city. “Rot-toe outbreak! Make your way to the Market Square for a medical inspection, please!”

This threw a spanner in the works. The templars were not shy about using physical coercion to make sure nobody was avoiding the inspection, and Julovern was in the other direction. So, the party went for stealth and deception. Using his “Elfin Secret” Faerie Tie, Kvam suddenly disappeared, invisible to all mortals. After he snuck down an alley, Faaya told the nearest Templar that she’d seen someone sneaking down past him. He went to investigate, and immediately Kvam struck him with an almighty blow of his imperial longsword.

This was the part I was talking about earlier. I had fully expected the party to simply walk over to Julovern’s ship without incident and have an unexciting conversation about the status of his paperwork. However, I rolled a 1 on the encounter die. The absurdity of the result (rot-toe outbreak) took me by surprise and I couldn’t help but laugh, which of course set off the players’ paranoia.

Before they had a moment to take in what had just happened, they heard a noise from the entry to the alley. Two more templars stood, hands on their weapons. They asked Faaya to surrender. Kvam was still invisible, and neither could see him. At this point, Faaya decided to use her “Sophist” background; if she could succeed on a Charisma test, she could make any one person believe a blatant lie.

She cried out, feigning innocence, and one of the Templars (Hans, from the intro to this post) bought it without hesitation. His partner Klees was taken aback and turned to argue with Hans. Not wasting a second, a still invisible Kvam rushed up and dealt with Klees. Hans didn’t stand a chance either, taken by complete surprise as Faaya slit his throat from behind. And that is where we finished the session, the party standing over the complete mess they’d just made.

I didn’t even know Kvam could turn invisible. This was a very thrilling conclusion to the adventure. The players got to show off the background abilities that they’d picked during character creation two sessions ago, and the story was thrown into disarray thanks to some random rolls. Perfect! I will have to consider the consequences of these actions… Murdering three Black Sun Templars will not go unnoticed.

Thoughts

Whew, this report went a bit longer than the last two! I think part of that is because the session went really well and the game flowed very smoothly. The players knew exactly what they wanted to do and pushed the action forward with their decisions, and I felt much more comfortable running the game.

A special shout out to some common OSR procedures that I sprinkled into this session to help me keep the game flowing when faced with unexpected circumstances:

• Reaction rolls
• Morale checks (I like what ktrey wrote about them in his examples of play document)
• X-in-6 generic checks
• Overloaded Encounter Die
• With some extra bits from The Adventuring Day’s Escalating Encounter Die

These things aren’t all laid out in the Black Sword Hack book, so you need to insert them yourself if you wish to use them. Some GMs might not need or want them, but I found I did. I also toyed with the idea of implementing a slot-based inventory system for this adventure, but in the end decided not to. The adventure mostly takes place in a city with resources readily available, and the party has plenty of coin. I may make a ruling if they try to carry lots of big items, but it hasn’t been an issue thus far.

Three sessions in, I feel a lot more comfortable running the game. I will check in with my players to make sure they’re enjoying it and willing to keep going as I’d initially estimated a three-session game. I think it would be possible to run this game in three sessions, but you’d really need to speed things along and cut the unnecessary scenes to a minimum. I wanted to run a slower paced adventure, so I didn’t do that. It seems like they could be crawling round Nijmauwrgen for a few sessions to come.

 

 

No roll needed,

Feir