Nappendixia Campaign Session Report
Session #- 88 Session Date- 7/17/24
Time Passed- 1 Dungeon Expedition= 1 week
Roll Call- Magic User 1
Fighting Man Mercenary
Fighting Man 1
Hero, Fighting Man 4
Adventure Log- A lone Magic user enters the village of Stoneash, a small locale on the western part of the map, adjacent to the tip of an east-west mountain range. Within a few hexes there exists a castle lorded over by a Lawful Patriarch. He will aid the village, but visitors and travelers who approach his domain will be asked to pay a tithe or perform a divine Quest for the Patriarch. The mage has recently learned 3 spells and is eager to try his trade as an adventurer. His pack is laden with coin, and he is able to tempt the services of a mercenary armed with chainmail, sword, and shield. The mage equips himself with torches, oil, daggers, and some other supplies, and finds a town square seeking news and rumors. His intellect manages to impress a rather dull but kindly deputy who is quite the able fighter. He tells him of the nearby locale the Haunted Pass, a 2 towered fortress guarding a no longer used mountain pass that used to connect the castle to the village. Nowadays the castle must be approached by going around the mountains to the NE. The deputy says the Haunted Pass has both a reputation of housing bandits and other thieves, but also that it may contain many levels of mazes and passages filled with monsters and treasure beneath. The mage explains to the deputy that should the Keep be cleared out and fortified, a reopening of the mountain pass could bring prosperity to the village. He is motivated to bring the mage and his hireling out to the Haunted Pass to investigate. They arrive after a few hours of travel up into the base of the mountain range. They scout the stout double fortress, and see the southern tower seems to be the one that has an accessible entrance, they approach the rubble outside the entrance and 3 giant rats scramble to defend their turf, the main door adjacent narrowly. The party readies for missile fire and the mage exposes himself to attack to attempt to hurl flaming oil at the charging rats. Unfortunately the oil goes wide and the vicious rat clamps onto the mages femoral artery and he bleeds out in seconds. His body is brought back to the Heros horse and a second Fighting Man steps forward to aid in the investigation of the fortress. They cautiously follow the pathway of a few slightly ajar doors that the giant rats must have been following. Upon crossing the main entrance path, they realize that they had just narrowly avoided a pit trap. The corridor splits north and south, and they go south to a room mostly collapsed, with a deep pit of dirty tepid water at the bottom. They avoid the pool and make it across the room to a door that reveals a twisting hallway. They firebomb a room with 2 more giant rats, vanquish 2 skeletons that come to life in a long forgotten room, and stumble across a zombie that may have wandered up from a deeper level. When they backtrack the zombie, they find it had somehow been released or released itself from a small room hidden by a secret door. Inside the room they found a peephole that revealed a medium sized room containing 5 bandits. The fighting man elected to fire a bolt through the peephole at a guarding bandit, striking him, but not killing him he screamed and ran off down a corridor. The party then hoofed it around several corridors to get to the door of this bandit room, not being accessible from the peephole room. When they get there they kick in the door to find the 4 remaining bandits ready for battle and calling for reinforcements. The party spies a table with a few sacks of treasure on them behind the bandits and engages. They are slain, but not before the mercenary is cut down. The remaining 2 grab a sack of silver and one of gold and flee before more bandits can emerge, leaving the merc behind. They make it back to the village and rest the remainder of the week and divide their treasure.
Session Notes- This was a pretty informal showcase of my recent investigation of OD&D and all things mid 70s gaming and fantasy. I was able to take a few days and sit down with the 3 LBBs and the Chainmail Man to Man rules and a copy of Outdoor Survival for use of the map for a wilderness area and palace to set the village and nearby dungeon. This locale does have a place on the Nappendixia map, so sessions do have an impact on the campaign and will continue to be part of the Adventure Log session sequence, should the group do this again. We started with a basic overview of my look at the game, I indicated the small examples of where the books refers to any kind of setting or lore. It really only is contained in one passage- “descent beneath the ‘huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses’”. You can see from that one line a much more gonzo or weird fantasy world is connoted over any kind of high fantasy take on the fantasy medieval setting. We went through the simple process of char gen, which specifically states that the DM should roll the PC stats, but the player should roll the starting gold. I prepared a document going over everywhere in the rules it gives procedures of any kind for PCs to interact with the game with. (presented here- OD&D PC Options - Google Docs ) There is clearly a complete game here if you wanted to run it as a zero prep procedural dungeon and wilderness exploration game. That’s pretty much how it is presented in the books. In a world where the roleplaying game does not yet exist, people reading this game back in 74-75 likely interpreted the game this way. They were already familiar with Avalon Hill style chit wargames, which always provided a streamlined rulebook dictating all the ways you could interact with the game to gain a victory condition. Therse games generally had a combat results table and a time record sheet. There were roleplay elements in these games in things such as HQ counters that gave the historical generals name, but otherwise had no impact rules-wise. Little touches like this began the very first inklings of roleplay as players could act out the part of different generals and show off their historical knowledge while playing the game. So this is how gamers at the time were beginning to coalesce into understanding and developing the new field of roleplaying games. They knew there needed to be a well thought out combat system that had some strategy to it, they knew they had to interact with a game map and account for travel and time, and they had the seed of injecting elements of role playing into a dice game with more concrete mechanics. The DM’s role is also clearly spelled out in the rules too, 6 dungeon levels, a town map, and a world map are required to begin play. Now of course compared to later editions of D&D this edition can seem rather primitive and limited, but I think from the perspective of mid 70s gamers there’s so much here. Just enough procedures to explore dungeons and wilderness, just enough monsters to make for many sessions of exciting encounters, and enough ways to interact with the game through hiring men, luring monsters, mapping wilderness, and saving up to build a stronghold. This set definitely emphasizes the goal of leveling and running your own stronghold, a concept that may seem trite or too long in scope to many gamers, but at the time it was both innovative, and in line with a wargamers understanding of using a procedural ruleset to gain a win condition, with the ultimate win condition in OD&D being mastering and defending one's own domain in the campaign. We found in a session 1 scenario with zero prep we were able to develop enough of a world/setting to make it interesting, give options, yet keep it kind of simple for starters, leaving all the room for the game to grow in whatever direction it may. Clearly, both the rules state this, and gamers of that era would intuitively use lots of great fiction available to draw inspiration from. We really enjoyed using the Man to Man rules which is 2d6 based, not d20 based. There is some strategy in the weapons are classed in a scale from shorter quicker weapons to longer slower weapons. There’s an interesting matrix of how different weapons are effective against different armors, and some weapons grant initiative over other weapons, so there is a bit of strategy and gaminess in the rules that make it fun. I showed my player the chart and allowed him to pick weapons based on it, but a DM may want to run it by not showing players the chart and letting them figure out which weapons are more effective vs different weapons and armor. The combats flowed quickly and could be battlematted with actual distances laid out, or more theater of the mind combats, they both moved along. It should also be noted that the man to man rules are only employed when combatting 1HD opponents or less, and when monsters are 2hd or more the alternate d20 system is used. In the man to man rules higher level characters are granted multiple attacks vs opponents, giving it a real Conan feel and keeping things exciting. Also All PCs have d6 hp and 0hp is death so combat is quite lethal. We saw 2 1st level PCs killed in a 2 hour session. In all we really enjoyed the session, my player had fun and I had a low stress time managing the game. There are few books and resources to have to manage and enough procedures to make it so you don’t have to improvise much at all. I could definitely see in a modern setting this ruleset could get stale kind of quickly, there would be a need for new monsters, but overall there’s a fair amount of mileage that can be gotten from the game and it is certainly very pulpy, a little campy, and a fun nostalgic way to game. I look forward to returning to some more OD&D periodically.
Treasure and XP- Monsters- 4 Bandits 400xp, Zombie 100xp, 2 Skeletons 100xp, 5 Giant Rats 125xp. Treasure- 60gp/xp, 100sp/10xp=795xp. 1st level Fighting Man adventuring on Dungeon level 1 gets 398xp, 4th level Hero adventuring on Dungeon level 1 gets 99xp.
Graveyard- 1 Lt Foot- killed by the Werebear at the rail supply depot NE of Bartertown (session 79)
2 Silver Spearmen, 4 Kazarians, 4 Shortbowmen, 3 Hvy Hobilar- killed by wereboars and wild boars 1 day outside of Bartertown. (session 80)
5 Silver Spearmen, 1 Bowman- killed by by werewolves and a weird blood thing at Outpost 31 North of Bartertown (session 81)
1 Lt Cav- killed by Ogres at the crevasse north of Bartertown (session 82)
Jirel- P1 and Maria- C/A 1/1- killed by Trolls at Wardoof’s former ruined keep, now taken over by trolls. Godhard and Harry brought to Death’s door (1 week bedrest) (session 84)
4 Lt Foot killed Amphisbaena at Outpost 31, 8 H. Foot killed by Trolls at Wardoof’s ruined keep. (session 85)
Finnigan- brought to Death’s Door by poison needle trap in the lower Wizard’s Tower (session 87)
Magic User 1 killed by Giant Rats outside the Haunted Pass, Fighting Man 1 Mercenary killed by Bandits in the Haunted Pass (OD&D)(session 89)
No comments:
Post a Comment