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