Post Adventure Thoughts - The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen

Snapshot of my notes that I printed out based on the Retired Adventurer’s Better Notes series of blog posts. These were very helpful all the way through the adventure.

 

General Thoughts

Overall, The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen was incredibly fun and very educational. My skills as an RPG referee have undoubtedly improved over the course of this adventure, and the longer narrative arc allowed for a lot of immersion and memorable character moments. The dark humour and Lovecraft flavour both come through strongly in this one. The way we played it, it wasn’t very horror focused, it felt more like a Lovecraft themed adventure than a spook fest or an eerie mood piece. I think the dark aspects could be played up though, with the right group.

The module will require a lot of quick thinking from the GM and a little extra seasoning to fill in the blanks throughout. There’s 41 locations and a lot of them are just a single paragraph. There are events and NPCs hinted at, but not fully fleshed out. This will be a challenge for newer GM but I do think it’s a challenge worth taking on as it will be good practice.

Layout

The layout is pretty to look at, but hard to reference at the table. Looking at the city map and then flicking forward to the locations to match them felt like spinning plates, especially with no distinct city landmarks or districts to orient around.

The text is also very densely packed in there. It’s the Merry Mushmen editing flavour, which I appreciated in a dense zine of articles to be read like Knock, but for adventure layout I found myself frustrated with it. It also has a fair few typos to watch out for.

Length

I did not expect this adventure to last 15 sessions. That’s something I wish I’d known going in. I’ll know better from now on what kind of things make an adventure long and “sticky” – lots of things for PCs to trip over and get involved in. This one could really double up as a city setting, as Brad and Yochai mentioned on their podcast review recently.

Expectations

In addition to understanding the proper length of a given game, I learned too that tone is an important thing to consider before diving into a game. I didn’t quite anticipate the tone that this adventure would take, and I think I was expecting a bit more Elric due to the tone of the core rulebook. That was really my own mistake, since the adventure text is very clearly Lovecraftian in tone, and I should have just adjusted based on that.

Rules preference

I’ve also refined my personal palette for what I enjoy in RPGs over this game, as well. I’ve decided that Black Sword Hack is a little on the light side for me when it comes to longer games. Some of the aspects, like player-facing rolls and roll-under ability checks as a core mechanic, are not things I gelled with, and I often found myself wanting to rule things differently.

I don’t like roll under ability checks as a core component because they tie roll outcomes too strongly to ability scores. In contrast, other games such as Delving Deeper only give players a small bonus to certain actions if their Strength score is 15+. This de-emphasises ability scores, and emphasises player strategy, character traits and usage of things like items, environment, etc.

Balancing

I also think that if you were to run this game system yourself, you may need to house rule a few of those background special powers. At-will invisibility and assassination were the most potent combination, and the two players were able to trivialise quite a few encounters throughout this adventure. It’s okay to have these things tempered a little either in-fiction or simply as an agreed upon house rule.

Variety

Something I really enjoyed was introducing variety throughout the adventure. In session #8, the players took the role of two different characters for a session (I used A Man on the Road and it was awesome). In session #14, I used By This Poleaxe to run a large-scale city skirmish, “zooming out” the action from the two main characters. These diversions were fun dashes of heterogeneity to the adventure that I think worked very well and served to flesh out elements of the world that wouldn’t be accessible through the eyes of the two usual player characters.

 

Thanks,

Feirsteax

 

The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #15

Finale (played 03/09/2024)

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 

 

Incomplete snippet of campaign notes taken using OneNote for this adventure.

Explosions in the Deep

The players ingeniously brought a big barrel of gunpowder with them to blast open the portcullis below the temple and were therefore able to enter the evil Black Sun Temple from below!

This did not spare them, however, from a cruel ambushing at the hands of four Deep Infiltrators of the Black Sun, who had been tailing them in secret for some time now. These four assassins were quite brutal, and through the battle, managed to kill all of the player characters’ allies (including poor old Bonifacio, the dog-shaver and secret hit-man for hire).

The rules for inter-NPC combat in Black Sword Hack mean that PC allies will take d6 damage four times in six. It felt a bit too punishing and NPC allies tended to die quite quickly.

I prefer when NPC actions are simply ruled the same as PCs. When players ask their hirelings to do weird non-combat actions, you just rule it as you would a PC.

So much I didn't use in here

Sarakasas the Mad

They pushed through the depths of the temple, clearing rooms of any tentacled Deep Ones that they encountered thanks to the insta-killing power of the newly acquired Roodr.

Upstairs, in the central chamber, they saw a gruesome scene. Sarakasas was acting like a one-man army, standing atop a pile of corpses as rebels came forward to slash at him in total vain. Sarakasas was completely impervious to damage from non-Roodr sources, and it led to this terrifying outcome.

Faaya spotted someone lurking in the alcoves – it was the leader of the Thieves Guild, Zvoorinius! After a brief chat with them, she determined that they didn’t pose an immediate threat, but if things went south they would probably try to jump in and try to benefit from the fallout.

Alcantor and Lady Estabana were still standing, but their morale was almost entirely shaken by the sudden disaster that befell their rebel army. Thankfully, Kvam was here with the giant trident, Roodr, to sort things out.

In the first few rounds of battle Kvam turned invisible and entered barbarian rage, and Faaya cast Darkness and Withering on Sarakasas, which meant he couldn’t directly target them. Things went pretty quickly downhill after that for Sarakasas.

Within a couple of rounds, Sarakasas was slain by the mighty power of the Roodr, and everyone celebrated. There was a moment of slowed down time where Sarakasas’s immortal soul hung in the central chamber, and the cursed ring that Faaya was wearing started glowing and pulsing.

The otherworldly entity she had made a pact with, Emptalar of the Void, wanted her to plunge the ring into the soul so he could absorb it into his power vortex. She did so and was rewarded with EVERY STAT being boosted to 20!

At this point, the adventure had concluded, and I was just riffing for the finale to make it feel climactic. Every stat at 20, why the hell not!?

Great Deep Old Freak!

They emerge onto the streets as the earth shook and the gigantic Deep Old One quaked towards the temple. Kvam and Faaya performed an amazing feat of athletics and ingenuity by using one of the big monster’s huge tentacles to fling themselves into the air and perform a massive plunging attack on the beast.

This meant they flew for three turns and dealt TRIPLE damage when they landed. By an amazing coincidence, the total damage output after this calculation was 45 HP – the exact amount needed to slay the Deep Old One!

Epilogue

The session ended with a brief reunion with key NPC friends, like Sfen who washed up on the reef, and Rhosa who was saved from the depths of the temple, and even Julovern and his amazing airship.

The party decided to leave the city via airship and visit Taineri for a final goodbye as well – and the adventure ended with both of our heroes setting off into the clouds…

 

 

Goodnight,

Feir

The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #9 - #14

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

 

Off The Rails

A lot transpired over these five sessions. I thought sesh 9 would be the big rebel meeting to prepare for a raid on the temple. But the players decided the morning of the meeting would be a good time to pull off a quick prison break. So that led to 3 more sessions of temple crawling under extreme cover.

Cover got blown at the end of a session, very good cliffhanger. Both PCs stuck in a dark underground cult hole, one of them drugged up and drowsy. The other tied up as a false prisoner (her cover).

 

tldraw: a fantastic resource for collaborative mapping

Eventually they got out, not without casualties and chaos being unleashed. Prisoners were all freed, but only some escaped. Templars, cultists and priests were all going haywire; killing, fleeing, screaming. A nice glimpse of Sarakasas – first actual time the party has seen him.

 

Cosmic Struggles

Along the way Faaya picked up a cursed ring. I had been reading Elric and was thinking of ways to introduce otherworldly patrons and make the cosmic struggle more personal to the characters. The answer lay in Faaya’s backstory as a vampire. Her civilisation had history in making pacts with chaos entities, so Emptalar of the Void appeared and made her an offer. The Void sensed power and potential in her, so it thought she’d make a good ally / servant.

Emptalar is something I made up. It’s silly, but whatever.

So now she has these nightmares. She hasn’t actually put the ring on yet, though. When she does, it’s going to eat little parts of her soul. This can be mitigated by feeding it other people’s souls. Isn’t that cool?

 

NPC Buddies

Along the way some new buddies were made, and old enemies showed up. Two thieves guilders joined the party as hirelings but they got arrested and are now awaiting their doom on the stranded reef across the bay. Dostoyez of previous sessions turned up at the rebel meeting to attempt an assassination.

This was hilarious, I had a few lines of dialogue planned for the dramatic showdown between Dostoyez and Alcantor – who I’d prepared to be old friends turned enemies now due to the political situation – but Kvam one-shot her before she could even open her mouth. He has barbarian rage and invisibility powers, both at will, and gets advantage on a d12 for damage, plus a d6 bonus from some other boon I can’t remember. So he scored 15 points of damage and she just dropped.

Sfen’s boat is fixed, and he decides to help the cause. Some thieves guild goons join his boat squad. He says he’ll sail out in the morning to keep an eye out for squiddies and fish demons in the bay.

And the Knights and Eastern Merchants have proven to be useful, unlikely allies too. The junk ship owned by the merchants has a cannon, and Sfen had gunpowder. So they agreed to fire the cannon at dawn to signal the beginning of the surprise raid on the temple.

 

The Raid

Yep, they launched a full scale rebellion / raid / full frontal assault on the Black Sun Temple. For this session (#14), I used mass combat rules. By This Poleaxe is a set of rules for running wargame like skirmishes of small to medium scale using theatre of the mind. I honestly don’t know if I got the numbers right on this one, since it seemed almost impossible for some units to land a successful hit, but we stuck with it.

By the end of the session, the ground had shifted as had the balance of forces. Sfen put up a valiant fight, but the Babasalem got absolutely skewered by the Deep Old One. The player characters and the rebels made pretty good headway, with a decisive moment in their favour being the conquering of the barracks by Alcantor and Lady Estabana.

 

It was pretty cool! Now all that remains is the final showdown with Sarakasas and some wrap-up things. I do hope to finish the mini-campaign in session #15 as, despite how fun this has been, I feel as though the adventure is being stretched to its limit at this point and I’m really eager to try something new.

 

 

Okay, I’m 5 minutes late for the next session, gotta go!

Harry