Red Frontier Campaign Session Report
Session #- 40 Session Date- 3/24/23 Time Passed- 6 days (3/34-3/29)
Roll Call- Laughing Fox- Druid 8
10 Longbowmen
1 Pikeman
Dog Breath- Fighter 6
Laurentis- Cleric 7
Laurentis’ Henchmen
Dusty- Cleric 1
Cindy- Fighter 5
5 H. Crossbowmen
20 Shortbowmen
50 Lt. Infantry
Cindy’s Henchman
Neil Young- Fighter 3
Adventure Log- During downtime from last session Cindy and Neil Young spend a week training with Gould, Boldvay’s fighter tank gunner, and they each gain a level. They and the rest of the party sans Beacon, spend time in Boldvay’s dome, getting used to the curious 1 mile wide, ½ mile high metal dome with everything inside coated or turned to metal, all the ground, grass, trees, streams etc are still under the dome, but have somehow been made metallic. They are shown the below ground area, this area was originally discovered by the party a long time ago, when they discovered the stargate to Jull-Nar and the crab vehicle. Boldvay has built his lab down here and the stargate is down here now newly reconfigured. They see the layout of his about to be official domain, there is a village of orcs adjacent to the north end of the dome called Rokville, and at the southern end of the dome a village of pagan humans in a village called Wickerwood. They also meet the over 1000 Kangsta clerics living here from Brovenloft. Boldvay and the clerics are preparing to construct a bronze pyramid to the east of the dome so the clerics can have their own stronghold. Boldvay also tells the party of 2 other big projects he has coming to fruition. He is very close to clearing his hex and gaining level 12 which would officially allow him to collect monthly taxes from his citizens in a fully realized domain. He also will be able to craft a magic item upon leveling. He shows them the Dakersaurus shell he took after defeating the Dakersaurus. He had Glom’s armorer craft it into a shield, and will be able to enchant it to +5. On 3/20 Boldvay heads out in his hovercar to hopefully finish clearing his hex and gaining enough xp to level. He returns on the 24th with great success. He has formally cleared his hex, leveled to 12, and can now train up and learn the new spell enchant an item. After training he can begin crafting the shield. When that is complete he will be hosting a celebration of Independence Day for the Grand Duchy of Boldvaynia. He also returns with 80 tribesmen and a herd of wild horses, which plays perfectly into Cindy’s plan of finding, equipping, and hiring more troops to her company. Boldvay recommends to the tribesman chief that Cindy is a great warrior and it would be an honor and a way to increase their prowess to hire on with Cindy. He agrees to let some of his people be hired on as men at arms, and Cindy hires and equips 40 Lt. Foot and 20 Shortbow archers. An army of this size requires an armorer and an animal trainer, and she is able to hire a level 4 Knagsta cleric newly trained as an armorer, and an animal trainer from among the pagan villagers who are adept at training wild horses. After gearing up and hiring the new troops he joins up with Laurentis, Laughing Fox and Dog Breath and they decide to head through the stargate back to Nappendixia to retrieve the men at arms and PCs who were left behind there in Bartertown. They assemble their large party and move through the stargate and into the hideout nexus level in the Eyeless Void Megadungeon. Things there are mostly the same, the bulette’s dead body continues to lie there and rot, however they notice the room is more hot and humid than before, they notice the rooms to the north feel even warmer and more humid. Not wanting to get sidetracked, they move into the elevator shaft hoping to make it back to the kenku’s area and negotiate passage down the cliffside. The shaft is steamy with humid heat, and when Laurentis reaches into the pulley cables to begin raising the lift he is blasted in the face with a gout of boiling water and a creature made of hot bubbling water flies out of the pulley shaft and begins hovering over the party on watery wings angrily attacking. The slight watery creature receives several blows from the party, almost killing it, and Laughing Fox begins casting a chill temperature spell, but it manages to get off one last attack, a blast of steam explodes into the room bathing the PCs and 8 of the Lt Foot in scalding water. Fortunately Laughing Fox’s chill spell goes off right after the steam attack and the amount of damage is lessened, but unfortunately it is still enough to scald the 8 footmen to death. With that the final blows on the mephit take it out and it disintegrates to a puddle of hot water. After the combat they move up the shaft and stage their army just outside the trap door that leads to the kenku area. Knowing there are giant rats in the next room, Laughing Fox casts invisibility to animals and moves alone through the trap door into the room, giant rats scurry about but ignore him. He moves east towards the kenku area and their cliffside exit. After a few minutes he bumps into 2 kenku and has an awkward wordless conversation with them. He is able to negotiate passage for the whole party to be flown down the cliffside for 1pp per PC and 1 gp per henchmen/troop. It costs several platinum and over 70 gold but they get the party staged at the bottom of the cliff. Laurentis asks about his 2 henchmen who were possessed by the astral searchers, he left them with the kenku in the hopes that they would improve or resist the possession. The kenku report that they never changed, and their strange evil eventually unnerved them and they flew them out of the mountain and left them on the ground to their own devices. Laurentis is convinced that the henchmen are both unsaveable and not much of a threat to this land so decides to just let them go and not worry that they will cause much trouble as they are only 1st level. They moved through the stargate in the late afternoon, and now it is dusk and they decide to camp at the base of the mountain rather than get a few hours of travel away from the mountain. They locate an indent in the rocks and see it as a good place to camp out of view. However, a series of 6 large spiders flow out of the rocks to defend their lair. Dog breath and 2 spearmen are bitten in the combat, dogbreath resists the poison, but the 2 spearmen collapse from the spider poison. One is beyond help, but Laurentis casts neutralize poison on the other one and is saved. The rest of the night's rest and 2 days travel to Bartertown go uneventfully. They arrive in Bartertown and quickly track down their people and horses. They try to come up with several ways the horses could possibly be lifted up the cliffside, could they hire a mage to levitate them? A few ideas are tossed around, but ultimately they decide it's too much trouble and instead donate the horses to Papagallo in exchange for his hospitality and alliance. The full complement of troops, plus the PCs who stayed behind, Ricarda, Arthur, and Robin all fall into formation and begin the trip back to the megadungeon to head back through the stargate. However, the greatest threat of the session was yet to occur. In the morning of the first day of travel away from Bartertown, the party sees a familiar and fearsome sight. The large red dragon they spied in the sky the last time they were in Nappendixia again appears in the air, and this time he does not ignore the party. The dragon makes a loping pass around in the air and swoops over the long line of the party and blasts the front third of the line with fire breath. Dog Breath Laughing Fox and Laurentis make their saves but are still badly burned, and Dusty and 5 spearmen and 10 lt foot are incinerated to ash. As quickly as it started it is over as after the gout of flame the dragon flies off with what might be a smile on its face. Nelson the dragon lets the party know who is the top level predator in this area. After policing up their dead, they move on and get to the megadungeon mountain without any further attacks. They are able to signal the kenku in the dusk light and pay their passage up the cliff. They return to the stargate and make it back to Red Frontier. Boldvay meets them as they return to the dome. He tells them about a ruined keep of over 150 brigands he found about 30 miles south of the ruins of Potsfort. They could pose a threat to any settlers trying to rebuild Pottsfort, and would make a good target for a fledgling army looking to get some experience.
Session Notes- So this was an impromptu session. I was not planning on running a game, but this particular Friday Cindy posted asking for a session so they could travel back to Nappendixia and retrieve her mounted troops and try to find more troops for her warband. I happened to have the evening free, so agreed to run a session and 2 other players also wanted to jump in. Also, it’s a really good feeling when players ask you as a DM to run extra sessions, it means they enjoy the game and continue to think about it, so I wanted to accommodate the request. It was a totally open session, no agenda on my part, Cindy spent a good hour of the beginning of the session looking at what troop types she had available, how much it would cost to equip them, how many sergeants etc. are necessary, and what support staff (armorers, animal trainers etc) were also needed for her. It was really interesting to watch this process. Cindy’s player is well versed in the rules for constructing armies. This has been a growing topic recently in online gaming discussions- the effectiveness of mid-level fighters as leaders of small armies as opposed to adventuring with a group of PCs. The online community has attacked this topic with vigor, and lots of different players with mid-level fighters are weighing in on how the process is going for them. I found watching Cindy going through this process to be very interesting so I asked her player to write up a little blurb taking us through their thought process- what kind of troops are they most interested in, what troops are they finding not very effective, what’s the overall goal i.e. how big do you see this army getting etc. I thought going over those kinds of questions would be interesting for the session report, and Cindy was gracious enough to write a nice piece taking us through their process. here it is-
As requested: Deja Cindy's Downtime Decision Debrief
Situation: Deja Cindy (L5 Fighter) has just returned to the Red Frontier from Nappendixia. She is looking to build a warband and fulfill her dream of becoming a warlord.
In her party she has L3 Fighter Henchman, Neil Young. For mercs she has 10 Light Foot and 5 light crossbowmen. She also has on retainer 12 mounted x-bowmen and 20 horses that had to be left in Nappendixia. She wanted to find a way to bring them back to RF and some others needed to go back as well. Fortunately, Boldvay had just come back with some mercs that could be hired. Here is how that went: Available -
80 tribesmen, whose composition is: -20 Heavy foot -40 Light Foot -20 short bowmen
As L5 Cindy can command as many scores of troops as her level, so 100 troops. With a L3 henchmen, he could serve as a Lt and extend my number by 10x his level, so, 30. HOWEVER, the purpose of Lts is to extend the command of Captains AND Captains can only command 1 troop type. So in order to have this Lt expand Cindy's leadership, she'd either need to be commanding all one troop type.
This led to the final decision to hire the 20 short bow and the 40 light foot to bring the total force to 87 and keep Cindy under her cap with: - 50 light foot - 20 Short bow - 5 xbow -12 mounted xbow
While on the adventure Cindy lost 10 light foot. So now that Cindy's back she will work eventually to hire 60 more light foot and that dude's 20 heavy foot. Hire a captain (possibly the tribal chief), and fill out the Lt ranks. That tribal chief was lvl 5 so he could command 5 Lts, and eventually bring the light foot contingent to 250 (100 - captain, 30 - Lt x 5)
As you can see there’s quite a lot going on here, almost a mini game within the game- managing your money to maximize the effectiveness of your troops, choosing more cost effective troops over others, and figuring out the best way to acquire new troop contacts. The one aspect that is not well-spelled out in the rules is the finding/acquisition of new troops. There is a chart on DMG pg. 30 for random rolling for finding troop types, but it is unclear how often a player can roll on the chart. I suppose you could look at the rules for acquiring henchmen and make a ruling based on that, but I came up with something that made sense to me. For every week a fighter looks for troops in a populated area they can roll once on the chart. If they have a fighter henchman assist in the searching, they can get 3 rolls for every 2 weeks spent searching. Non-fighter characters could also have access to the chart, but to a lesser degree. During this session Cindy initially asked Boldvay if she could draw troops out of his domain’s population, and because I know exactly what troop types my population consists of, rolling on the chart was not the way to go. For example, there are no Heavy Cav in Boldvay’s domain, so Cindy would never be able to draw that troop type from Boldvay. As Cindy drew troops from Boldvay’s people I would cross those people off my citizens list and transfer them over to Cindy. However, Boldvay just made 12th level and can now start collecting taxes based on his domain population. So as I let Cindy draw citizens out of my domain it lessens my tax base. I allowed Cindy to draw from some newly found tribesmen I was just bringing into my domain. Cindy has already taken 60 of the 80 tribesmen available, and will likely hire the last 20 and the chief too. Boldvay can’t really afford to lose any more population, but he was still able to assist Cindy. He offers to teleport her to the Power Station, the current location with the largest population on the game map. This is a non-descript population, and a much larger one at that, so it would make sense that here Cindy could just make straight rolls on the table to acquire troops. This new aspect of the game is one I'm very interested in pursuing, as is Cindy’s player. They are already looking for a threat to put their army up against. I’m definitely looking forward to running some mass combat with Cindy’s growing army.
PS- One last thing- the dragon that breathed on the party. That came about completely from random die encounter rolls. If you remember from last session, the party encountered a red dragon which flew overhead and made no notice of them. That was the result of rolling a 20 on the table (the only number for dragon) then making 2 reaction rolls for the dragon, a. Would he notice, and b. Would he care? The first time he rolled on the friendly side of the table both rolls, so he ignored the party. But amazingly, on this session, the very next trip they tried to take from Bartertown to the megadungeon, I again rolled a 20 for dragon on the random encounter table after the party had triggered an encounter. It was too serendipitous not to make this dragon a permanent fixture of the campaign, so after it breathed I rolled a reaction roll, and this time it came up friendly, so I had the dragon say “HaHa” and fly away, instantly causing a response from the party naming the dragon Nelson after the kid from the Simpsons. Thus the birth of Nelson the dragon completely through emergent play through random tables. I’m looking for a patron to run Nelson, get in touch if interested in running a red dragon patron.
Treasure and XP- Monsters- Steam Mephit 243xp, 5 Lg Spiders 385xp, Nelson the Dragon meet and greet 1000xp= 1628xp. Treasure- Mephit 9pp, Spiders 40cp, 45sp, 10ep, 24gp, 15pp= 153xp= 1781xp total. / 4 PCs= 445xp each, PCs with henchmen- 379xp, 66xp for the henchman. Add % bonus if appropriate.
Graveyard- (Death’s Door)- Robin- brought to -1 by the Caryatid Column, needs 1 week bed rest. #34
3 Mercenary Pikemen killed by a spiked pit trap in the Chambers of the Eyeless void, 1 at death’s door, needs 1 week bed rest. #35
2 Longbowmen killed by a Poltergeist in the Eyeless Void Megadungeon. #38
Ned- Magic User 1 and Lucky- Illusionist 1- souls destroyed by Astral Stalkers, Alemondro- Fighter 1, 2 pikemen- squashed by a Bulette, 5 Heavy Crossbowmen killed by Gorilla-men. #39
Dusty- Cleric 2, 10 Lt Foot, 5 Longbowmen- fried by Nelson the Dragon, 8 Lt. Foot- scalded by a Steam Mephit. #40
