A Man on the Road (played 08/05/2024)
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: 4h ish
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| Map of the Known Realms – an item in Lady Estabana’s inventory. |
Report
Last session, the party established contact the Thieves Guild, fought a bunch of violent fish-man hybrids, and learned that the Templars were getting more and more suspicious.
I reminded the players of this to highlight to them that their Anonymity Die is dangerously low. It is at a d4 now, and if it goes any lower, they will be attacked on sight by the Templars.
Meanwhile, Alcantor was getting ready to come back home. His memory was cured by Duke Taineri in his necropolis, south of the city. As Alcantor got on his horse, Lady Estabana, a noble Knight of the Dominion, appeared on the crest of a nearby hill. She was riding a huge stallion which carried the unmistakeable form of the Roodr.
For this session, I decided to switch perspectives so the players could play out the return of the Roodr, rather than leaving it down to off-screen dice rolling by me. It gave the players something novel to play with and allowed me to try something weird and different. I had been feeling a bit frustrated with the city crawling portion of the adventure, so I wanted to shake things up.
I prepared character sheets for both Alcantor and Lady Estabana using the character creation procedures. Alcantor was level 5 and Estabana level 3 and they both had some interesting abilities.
For the actual session prep, I used A Man on the Road by Ian Yusem as well as the forest crawl generation procedures from Cairn 2e (WIP).
Due to some elaborate catastrophe involving Julovern and his airship, neither of them were able to get back to Nijmauwrgen by air. The only option was a horseback ride through the misty moor and dark Mystwood.
Stealing an idea from some story games (I think I heard this on a live play of Trophy Gold / Dark), I posed a question to the players: “What catastrophe befell the Airship that meant it could never fly again?” They described a simultaneously slapstick and horrifying sequence of events that culminated in Julovern steering the airship directly into a mountain and setting the whole thing on fire. Burning wounds, yikes.
From here, the two brave riders ventured north, into the Mystwood. They’d heard that a demon stalked the old Myst Road. Of course, it was also the fastest route available to them, so they decided to risk it.
Rolling on some of the tables included in A Man on the Road provided me with the idea that he would pose as a demon.
Soon, their progress was blocked by a fallen tree. They managed to cut through it using some ingenuity and equipment.
The fallen tree obstacle didn’t work very well. It felt a bit artificial, even though I had prepared this location and this obstacle in advance. The question arose, “can we ride around it?” Somehow, I hadn’t thought of that until they asked the question, so I had to scramble to retroactively describe the scene as a narrow gully, with rocky terrain on either side of the tree blocking progress if they wanted to bring their horses.
After clearing the fallen tree, Alcantor’s horse tripped on something unseen below. He fell off with a thud and saw that it was a rope trap. Someone was stalking them!
I provided them with some information (a swooshing noise) to indicate potential danger. The player characters trotted on slowly and I ruled that they triggered the trap since they were still on their horses.
A strange goat-headed figure in the bushes fired a crossbow bolt at them and cackled. It demanded the travellers relinquish their giant trident or die. After a bloody battle, the two travellers escaped, but the goat-headed man was not defeated. He whistled for his horse and a huge Beast emerged from the treeline. Together they retreated into the forest depths. This wasn’t to be the last we’d see of them.
After galloping deeper into the forest, the two riders stopped briefly to regain some strength. A strange host of shambling bog-men were milling around a clearing, though they weren’t immediately hostile. Instead, they were simply insane. When the pair tried to ride past them, one of the bog bodies reached over to Alcantor and puked a mouthful of maggots and nectar straight into his mouth. It was sickeningly delicious.
The next obstacle was more natural, but nonetheless terrifying. A brown bear stood in the road, sniffing at the air. Clearly, the creature was hungry and looking for her dinner. The bear noticed Alcantor and his knight and started ambling towards them.
This was just a random encounter roll for a bear, and it turned out to be the most straightforward and satisfying minor encounter of the session. The evergreen advice to Just Use Bears wins again.
Thanks to some quick thinking on the part of Lady Estabana, they were able to sneak past unharmed. She gathered all the rations she could spare and spilled their contents onto the side of the road. The bear perked up at the smell of such delicious, free food and went over to chow down. This allowed the crew to trot gently past, occasionally shushing the horses as they threatened to become skitterish in the presence of the bear.
Finally, the party came to a ridge overlooking an old misty swamp. Just beyond it, Nijmauwrgen sprawled onto the sea. They were on the home stretch, but their dangers weren’t over yet. The goat-headed man on the road from earlier was ominously silhouetted against the sky on an opposing ridge. They watched as the man trudged into the swamp, using natural trenches and uneven terrain to set up some kind of ambush.
Alcantor felt extremely ill, the maggoty bog-nectar clearly catching up with him. He vomited and huge writhing maggots spilled from his gob. Losing 7 HP, he almost passed out from the strain of it all. But he kept his composure, and the two decided to head to an old ruined keep just on the outskirts of the swamp to get a better vantage.
Estabana used her a spyglass to get a better view of the man. He was dumping a long trail of sticky black tar across the bog, following a natural trench. Bundles of torches slung by his side, and it looked like he was priming it to be set ablaze.
Eventually, Alcantor went down to reason with him. The man still wanted the trident, and Alcantor was unmoving in his refusal to give it up. There was only one way to proceed, combat!
It was a treacherous battle. The man had many underhanded tactics that he used to get the upper hand despite being outnumbered. At one point, he even deliberately attacked his own horse, Beast, to rile it up and get it angry. The huge stallion thundered across the swamp, hurting itself even more in its furious trample, and rammed Alcantor to the floor.
Alcantor was knocked out and Estabana was at the top of the keep firing potshots with her crossbow. With incredible luck, she landed a bolt on the man’s neck, and he slumped to the floor.
She thought better of lingering around any longer and roused Alcantor awake. Concussed but still furious, he shoved the man completely down into the swamp to drown him. They turned and made towards Nijmauwrgen. A few minutes later, they could hear gasping and gulping behind them. The man had somehow survived the drowning!
He chased after them and set the trench of tar alight, but he was too late. His cruelty had kept him alive, but the two riders escaped his clutches and galloped towards Nijmauwrgen.
This combat was messy as hell, but I like how it worked out. It had some of the same issues I identified before of struggling to contextualise an encounter. In the case of the fire-pit trap, I had to describe it as a giant trench that somehow spanned the whole swamp and on either side of which were cliffs. This, again, felt artificial. I’m honestly not sure how best to deal with this.
Otherwise, it went really well. There was danger, tactics, surprises and twists. I’ll write more in the thoughts section below.
At the city gates, the guard grilled them, asking awkward questions. But when Estabana pushed a fistful of silver into his palm, he looked the other way and let them through without another word…
Thoughts
The actual encounter from the Man on the Road pamphlet was really fun. It takes a little effort to find a nice environment in which to slot it into, but once you do, the character is totally brutal. He has a lot of tricks, including multiple ways to cheat death and come back with a vengeance. The players really enjoyed discovering just how depraved this awful man was, and the combat was very thrilling as it was genuinely dangerous. Alcantor could have died or been kidnapped had Lady Estabana not landed that last crossbow bolt.
Some inspiration from the OSR discord came into play in a nice way here. There was an interesting conversation about “Jewelbox” dungeon design and the importance of empty rooms. Someone had critiqued the concept as sometimes resulting in dungeons where every room contained “messed up stuff that will kill us” without many safe locations or places to retreat to. It inspired me to add a few “empty” locations to the forest crawl for this session. The ruined tower was one such location, and immediately the players grabbed it and used it as a defensive vantage point. Cool!
I think if I were to rerun this, I’d tweak the forest crawl a bit. There didn’t seem to be any reason for the characters to deviate off the main Myst Road at all, so the other locations felt almost wasted. Some of the random encounters weren’t all that interesting, either (fallen tree, bleh). But in general, I’m very positive about how it all went.
Timing of sessions and one-shots is a constant learning curve for me. I thought I’d struggle to fill the time, but this turned out to be our longest session thus far!
Thanks,
Feirsteax