The free kriegspiel rpg/wargame scenario “Christmassy Lapfantasy” ultimately ran for two months, but we finally did manage to finish it this week. The Discord after-party has been going on for days since. I’m a bit relieved, as I’ll expect to do great things with the time freed from the game. First, though, it’s time for a bit of an after action report.
Christmassy Lapfantasy
Lapfantasy is a simple multiplayer refereed wargame scenario I rush-developed for a birthday party in 2019. The initial run was a simple and off-hand thing, but it’s not like this second go-around was much more elaborate either: I didn’t do any extra prep for it, we just figured out how to conduct the game online with video, text chat and postal elements. The game ended up taking two months to run through, and it was something of a creative success, and fun to boot, so kudos to us.

The scenario concerns the political and cosmological fate of “Turja”, a fairy tale fantasy Lapland setting that I had lying around in my desk drawer. The geography of Turja for the purposes of the scenario was copied from real-world Lapland. I actually wrote a pretty good intro to the scenario in the newsletter back when we started, so I’ll just refer you to that for the details. I recommend referring to that to make sense of what I’m writing here, I won’t reintroduce the starting positions and factions here.
The most important extra element since then was that a seventh player joined the game from the second session on: Saana the Giant was a Jotun (a primordial being descending from before the cosmogenesis) who’d mysteriously awoken from his slumber in stone, a stranger in a strange land. Saana went on to play spoiler as a neutral party in the games of the gods, as I’ll account a bit later.
The basic goal in this kind of wargaming is for the players to process the scenario with whatever incomplete information and information-generating means they’re given, and then develop and execute a plan of action that helps their faction fulfill their goals in the scenario. It’s important to distinguish between this kind of simulative wargame “victory” and a boargame “victory”; the latter is a formal zero-sum social acknowledgement condition among the players. Like many roleplaying games, a wargame like this only has winning and losing in the sense of doing a better or worse job at leading your faction towards its goals. The scenario is inherently designed to be interesting, which is not the same as fair or balanced. Some factions are stronger than others, but you don’t get any victory points for ruling it over the other players; the only thing that matters is how good of a job you do in leading your faction towards success with their goals. Morally speaking it’s possible for a faction to lose while its player is still acknowledged as the best at the table, for sometimes the circumstances are so impossible that a cleverly mitigated loss is more impressive than an easy victory.
Scenario timeline
A superficial summary of what happened in the scenario:
Setpiece start: Midsummer Summit
The Midsummer Summit was the setpiece scene that kicked off the scenario: after the old gods abandoned Turja, Santa Claus had followed the unstabilizing power politics for a few years before concluding that it was time to try and avert disaster. All faction heads were called to Ear Mountain (Korvatunturi) for a high level summit. Basically an opportunity for the players to introduce their factions to each other, discuss the strategic big picture and seek common ground with the other factions.
As something of a genre-defiant move both the Snow Queen and Staalo Claus, monsters of winter dark that they were, decided to participate in the summit. This was technically an all-around risk in that nothing in the game’s processes strictly speaking prevented the players from attempting assassination on each other, unlikely as it was this early into the game. Snow Queen in particular was at the low ebb of her power in the middle of summer.
The summit ended up rather non-committal, but we can say that Prince Nighteyes of Sariola emerged as the clear victor there: with all three mortal leaders in the same room, the prince was quick to hammer out a basic agreement on a new horizontal trade route to be established overland, running from Arendelle to Bjarmia through Sariolan colonies, connecting the kingdoms in a new and direct way. The inexperienced teenage queen of Arendelle readily accepted the plan, apparently unrealizing of how these plans threatened Arendelle’s position as the middleman of Bjarmian trade with the southlands. For Bjarmians the plan was positive on mercantile terms, but queen Vierra had little understanding of the ethnic political issues it would raise.
The trade route plans would later become the core of Sariolan policy in Turja, as prince Nighteyes established fortified trading posts alongside the route, bringing Sariolan influence deep into western Turja without the other factions reacting to the over-reach in any way. In comparison, the other factions achieved little at the summit aside from increasing distrust towards each other.
Build-up phase: Autumn months
Autumn months were then spent in building and preparation by all factions. The basic strategic stances, faction by faction:
Arendelle folded into itself as the player dropped out of the game after the first week, as one does. I ran Arendelle as a NPC faction for the rest of the game, but as Snow Queen and Staalo Claus put major pressure on them, they ultimately ended up becoming a satellite of the Akka Troll Court.
Sariola put the majority of their energy into developing their trade route, constructing the forts and manning them. Prince Nighteyes got personally entangled in the Bjarmian-Turjan ethnic politics as the awakening Turjan national spirit demanded reparations and rollback of land grabs the Sariolan colonies had accomplished over the last few generations. There was a danger of the Turjan unrest evolving into a sort of low-intensity frontier war between the colonists and the natives, but Nighteye’s heroic diplomatic efforts (bolstered by his personal fate magics) grounded the lightning.
Bjarmia was ruled by queen Vierra, an international adventurer thrust on the throne by half accident. She was of Turjan heritage herself, and got swept up by the vision of organizing and defending native Turjan Sami hunter-gatherers from what she perceived as the abusive politics of the kingdoms and gods of the other factions. Vierra spent much of her time away from the city of Bjarm, which suited the local magnates just fine. Vierra’s moves were not specifically targeted towards the Sariolans, but that’s how the Turjans interpreted them, Sariola being the greatest single source of oppression in their immediate lives.
Santa Claus knew to distrust the intentions of the Akka Mountain Troll Court and its fell king, the Staalo Claus. His chosen strategy was training special forces units from Yule gnomes to defend Ear Mountain and its dependencies in the event of war; the resulting unit, the 1st gnome commando company, was a fearsome ~200 cap strong company of sanity-deprived redcaps ready and willing to go to any lengths necessary to maintain the supremacy of Christmas over any competing ideologies. Lightweight to deploy, but not decisive in a full-scale war. The other thrust of Santa’s attentions related to magical research, mainly over Jotun powers that were emerging as the greatest threat to the lands of Turja.
Staalo Claus was playing the long game, spending the fall months bolstering the mobilization of his immense troll army; roughly 10 000 trolls in arms, easily double the other factions combined. Wolf-riding cavalry was added because why not, and both diplomatic and espionage initiatives were launched while the trolls prepared unseen within their mountain. The trolls begin the scenario ready to march, but the delay of four months in kicking off the war, and the soft power initiatives engaged in the meantime, certainly helped completely confuse everybody else.
Snow Queen‘s early game was necessarily limited to magical studies and conniving, as her powers would only properly flourish when winter would come to embrace the Turjan lands. Laying low in her winter palace at Spitsbergen, the Queen crafted magics, summoned winter to hurry things along and studied various matters to be ready to act when the time came. I cannot in good conscience call the time spent anything but productive, as the Queen proved far, far more informed about magical matters in Turja when the time came than anybody else.
Saana the Giant awakened to join the game a couple of weeks after midsummer. The land was unknown to him, for he had slept for untold ages (roughly 10 000 years), and didn’t know what had happened to awaken him, nor what had happened to his people. (Figuring things out and discovering his place in the new world order was pretty much the faction goal here.) Saana wandered around, meeting with the other factions and trying to find his grounding, doing little of import in the early game.
Things kick off: the Kekri Pivot
The Kekri Pivot was a phase of game in the late autumn, from late September to November, when things started kicking off for real. Several important events occurred partially simultaneously, partially reacting in quick sequence to each other. The players had only limited opportunity to change the stances their factions had taken after this: the preparations, whether magical or diplomatic or military, had been done. The choices they made at this point largely determined which events their factions had a hand in influencing.
Staalo’s Kekri was something cooked up by Staalo Claus in its role as a “winter goat” (a specific magical role it had gained from the trolls of its kingdom). It was a compelling autumn feast intended for mortals, bolstering them against winter gloom and turning their faces away from Yule, the mid-winter festival that so powered Santa. The Kekri rituals were more of a long-term play, intended to grow slowly over several years (bold move from the player, that), but they did hit it big in the Lofotes, the southern part of the kingdom of Arendelle. Santa Claus went completely berserk over the competition, committing the majority of his available resources to fight over the Lofotes (a back end of nowhere, to be clear), so even if the “let’s build up a competing religion to leech magical power from Yule!” ploy in itself wasn’t that relevant in the short term, it attracted the opposition to over-commit, so in the end it has to be counted as a success for the trolls. The crazy commando gnomes made many enemies and proved conclusively to any parties with agents in the area that Santa was not above completely irredeemable war crimes when it came to defending his magical territory. We’re talking secret murder of peaceful opposition levels of oppression conducted by borderline-psychopathic redcaps.
The Torneträsk Crisis occurred soon after as the Akka trolls started their doom march towards Ear Mountain, intent on ousting Santa Claus from his throne. Staalo had prepared for the march superbly by spreading misinformation about the looming Ragnarok; despite the blatant literary coding of Santa and Staalo as the dual “fighting Clauses of Christmas”, many players genuinely believed that Staalo was mobilizing thousands upon thousands of trolls to march against Saana the Giant and his supposedly-soon-to-awaken Jotun friends. The mobilization itself surprised the rest of the factions unprepared, so much so that the Sariolans (who had been building trading posts uncomfortably close to the troll marching routes) were more than happy to sign a non-aggression pact as soon as they got promises about the trolls leaving the human factions in peace.
The Divine Marriage, the third major move from Akka Mountain soon followed. Snow Queen had concluded that her goals were not in opposition to the bitter revenge motivating the monstrous Staalo Claus, so she promptly pushed for a marriage alliance with the mighty monster. There was great magical potential in the Polar Night Alliance thus formed, such that as the winter gloom (natural phenomenon of the sun not rising in the northern climes during mid-winter) fell upon Turja the mortal peoples all fell into the grip of the major magical working of the Ice Fear (as per Lords of Midnight). Santa Claus would move soon to mitigate the working, but for the rest of the year the mortal factions were largely paralyzed by the fatalistic certainty that eternal winter darkness had befallen the lands of Turja.
Huh, I guess almost all of the big pivot moves were made by the emerging Polar Night Alliance. There is one exception, though:
The Great Raid of Queen Vierra was this interesting strategic setup where Vierra abandoned all attempt to mobilize heavy infantry into Turja from her distant power base in Bjarmia. Instead, what she did was gathering Turjan hunter-gatherers from both Bjarmian dependencies and across the map into a great thousand-man host (by native standards) camped on the western edges of the Bjarmian lands. These native hunters had the means to travel across the land at reasonable pace even in winter. Vierra’s brilliant plan in its entirety was to wait for “something to happen” (her words) so she could ride to war with the Turjan host and make a mess of whatever the other factions were plotting. This naturally meant that when the trolls started marching on the western end of the map, Vierra and her host traveled across Turja to join the war, whatever it was about. (She knew not, and apparently did not care.)
Decisive masterstrokes: Christmas Cometh
The Advent weeks prior to and including Christmas were a time of feverish maneuvering where we could finally see the preparations of the various factions carrying fruit. Let’s see what the decisive actions were like:

The Great Troll March was where the game got seriously wargamey (as opposed to the diplomacy, espionage and magic focus early on). My original goal with this scenario was to work out some ideas about operational warfare (incl. supply logistics), and while most players never fielded significant forces, Staalo and the Bjarmians did! The Bjarmians (for reasons that ultimately remained vague to me) attempted to fight a guerrilla delaying action against the trolls intent on marching on the Ear Mountain and torching it to the ground, but the trolls had total control of the situation with superior numbers and excellent logistics. The player even specifically guarded their logistics pipeline, which caused the Great Raid of Vierra’s to fail despite setup having succeeded rather well.
The Sariolan Connection was crucial to the troll war efforts. While ancestral enemies (as I informed both factions many times during the game, warning of the long-term political effects), the two faction heads decided that Sariola would remain neutral in the war. Staalo even managed to get the Sariolans to provide major supply for his marching trolls, thus directly enabling them to blitzkrieg towards Santa headquarters. Combined with successfully suborning the Arendellean merchant fleets, the Akka trolls had developed a supply system that overcame the formidable difficulties of waging war in the Turjan winter!
The Ice Roads were interesting in that they were totally the most humdrum of the military ideas the Polar Night Alliance generated in between counter-gravity magics, flying cavalry, troll clan magics and courting the Giant to join the war. The investment needed to construct the ice roads was minor (about a week of the Snow Queen’s personal time), but the effect of directly connecting Ear Mountain to the end of the troll supply pipeline was massive in terms of speeding up the travel, allowing the trolls to reach Ear Mountain firstest with the mostest.
The Polar Night Alliance consisted of Staalo Claus and the Snow Queen at this point, although they did do their best to convince the awakened Jotun, Saana the Giant, to join their new world order. The game certainly seemed to be theirs now that it had been proven that the trolls could indeed march and reach Ear Mountain: the Bjarmians had proved unable to significantly threaten their logistics tail, the Sariolans had decided to sit this one out, and Santa Claus did not have an army.
The troll army was instructed to wait to begin the actual siege of Ear Mountain until Christmas had passes safely. The understanding was that Christmas was when Santa’s cult magics were at their most powerful, so the Polar Night Alliance wanted to avoid taking that specific time to attack; better let Santa blow his wad in whatever way he could and then come in after his magic had been expended in making Christmas, the way it was every year.
Intermission: Some Roads Travelled
I’ll come soon to the climatic moves of the scenario, but first, a couple of side roads that were explored. The above story of the troll march was in hindsight, and to me, the actual main axis where the game progressed towards resolution, but the players who weren’t so active in that certainly messed around with various side projects. Some of the funniest:
Santa’s Hellfire Bombs were an accidental side discovery produced by Santa while attempting to develop magical means of capturing and curtailing Jotun magics. Santa learned how to “seed” a rock with a corruptive Jotun power that would over time gnaw upon the rock until it became frail and prone to exploding, spreading the Jotun fire all over the place. The larger the rock, the bigger the blast. The main limitation of the method was that the rock would need time to “mature” (more for larger pieces) before being ready to explode, and it had a rather limited self-life, as some munitions do. (This is roughly as safe and sane as using Warpstone as a fragmentation grenade in the Warhammer setting, to use a comparison familiar to some.) So of course what Santa does is, he starts developing a military doctrine around this reality-hostile weapon. It never got to be used in anger, what with the way the scenario developed, but amusing nonetheless.
Winter Elves were an off-brand variation of Yule gnomes that the Snow Queen produced when she noticed that she could overwhelm the nature of a given gnome with her own, far mightier fae nature. The result was a slimmer, blue-clothed, skate-wearing, cynical gnome. The Snow Queen used these kidnapped and brainwashed Yule gnomes for various purposes, such as for carrying mail and exploring alternate dimensions.
Preventing the Ragnarok was a concept that Staalo Claus used as a successful excuse for his war-mongering, on the premise that the Jotun were soon awakening and destroying the world. The funny part was how the Sariolan prince Nighteyes spent the last third of the game questing for the means to prevent the Jotun awakening. The prince visited a far-away southern city, Irem of the Pillars, on a convoluted quest to gain some sand of dreams for the purpose. When Nighteyes noticed that what he’d bagged was no sand, but rather the powerful elf lord Nightmare, he decided to duel the manifest being to tame it. Dying in the duel, Nighteyes spent two weeks in the Underworld before his fate magic could bring him back. Nighteyes returned to Turja at the tail end of the scenario, bringing a dangerous solution to a problem that did not exist.
Climax: Christmas and beyond
The final moves of the game were pretty exciting, as they ended up flipping the situation several times in quick succession. Here’s how it went down:
Staalo Claus dies in a magical accident. The Polar Night Alliance had been courting Saana the Giant, the only supernaturally potent character that might have allied with Santa Claus to defend Ear Mountain and the rest of Turja. Concerned that they would have to fight the Giant, Staalo Claus immersed within and unlocked the true secret of his monstrous might. Unfortunately for him, this secret was no less than a Jotun seed that’d been hiding inside him since the backstory. Now activated, the seed grew quicky beyond control and caused the birth of a new Jotun, extinguishing Staalo Claus in the process.
Santa visits Spitsbergen on Christmas Eve. One of Snow Queen’s many ploys revolved around a wishing letter sent to Santa, intended to gnaw at his moral certitude and trick him into breaking the behavioral taboos of the Christmas cult. Santa maneuvered these issues handily, and as the invitation allowed him to, indeed visited Snow Queen on Christmas Eve in her Winter Palace in the far north. Santa gave the Queen a gift appropriate to her wish, released the children she had been kidnapping due to her deteriorating sanity, and returned home humming happily.
Snow Queen discovers an unintentional trick. Later on Christmas Eve, Snow Queen examines her gift: it is a finely crafted snow globe, wondrously showing live feed imagery of children playing in the snow. (The Queen’d wished for “ever-lasting winter for the children to play in”.) In an accident predicted by neither Santa nor the Queen, an idle whim has her attempt to visit the children playing inside the globe; it is the case that the Snow Queen is present in all snow storms, and, well, this snow globe actually used real snow for realism purposes.
Snow Queen imprisoned on Ear Mountain. The Queen discovers that the snow globe she was given is actually a magical window into a cave built below Ear Mountain for the purpose of spying on her via the globe. The playing children are Christmas gnomes playing dress-up, it’s all a cruel trick! Her sudden appearance in the sensitive interiors soon summons Santa (who wield great magical might during Christmas, and has no difficulty arriving quickly), and while the Snow Queen tries to flee, the jolly master wizard ensorcerls her into captivity in the very spot. Seems like Santa is winning the game after all!
Santa makes a deal with Saana. One of the matters Santa resolved during Christmas was bringing Saana the Giant together with his lost bride, Malla. With the troll army left rudderless at the sudden disappearance of both Staalo Claus and the Snow Queen, Saana has no difficulty whatsoever claiming the right of the strong to direct the trolls to return home. The march on Ear Mountain ends before arrival, which is a good thing for the gnomes, as they have practically no army whatsoever!
Snow Queen escapes. The crazy dice continue giving unlikely outcomes, among them the notion that Santa’s elf prison isn’t so perfect after all: Snow Queen has learned earlier that she’s actually an elfy emergent personality manifestation of the Jotun Elder Ithaqua, and she has developed some minuscule control over Jotun magic (without causing herself to dissolve the way Staalo Claus did), which Santa’s masterful wizard prison does not account for. It takes Snow Queen several weeks, into mid-January, to be ready to escape, but when she does it is with a cunning plan.
Snow Queen fakes her death. Snow Queen’s escape seemed at first glance a suicide, but Santa isn’t convinced. Research into what happened to her seems stymied for several weeks until the gnome espionage net brings word: Snow Queen apparently escaped by killing herself and then recovering via use of a phylactery (or horcrux as the youngsters say) situated in her lair on far Spitsbergen. The Queen’s minions were gathering to protect her, for she would surely be very much weakened and unable to defend herself. This was all bullshit calculated to attract Santa into a trap; in reality the Queen escaped with Jotun magic and is in full strength.
Santa goes on a fateful journey. As one of the most controversial moves in the game, Santa, at this point a dominant party in the scenario with his enemies vanquished, decides to travel to Spitsbergen to put an end to the Snow Queen once and for all. Both characters are at this point considered powerful magical tyrants, the only serious competitors for domination of Turja. Santa’s burdened by petty war crimes and general lack of moral outlook, while Snow Queen has become infected by megalomania from her exploration of dangerous magics.
Santa’s expedition shapes out to be formed of only hero units (convinces prince Nighteyes, queen Vierra and Saana the Giant to accompany himself), and he’s going generally unarmed except for his innate magics and the nasty Jotunfire trick he’s been saving; Santa could theoretically speaking prime the entire Spitsbergen to explode in a megaton-level blast, should he gain access to the stone under all the ice of Snow Queen’s wintery wonderland.
Meanwhile, Snow Queen has armed herself with advanced Jotun magics and her own ace in the hole: the Mirror of Reason, a frozen lake with particular properties that she believed, on account of her research, to have potentially decisive effect on Santa. (Long metaphysical story there, but it was all real player deduction upon provided magical lore.)
The actual encounter was in hindsight somewhat one-sided; the brave companions Santa had brought with him turned tail when they saw the magical armies the Snow Queen had arrayed against them (I guess they expected the Queen to not have any forces of her own), and Santa was ultimately forced to continue alone into the maw of the intimidating Winter Palace, its walls of steel ice and gates of knife winds. There was nowhere bare stone for Santa to emplace his terrible weapon, while Snow Queen’s trap worked perfectly: she lured Santa into the middle of the Mirror of Reason and then blew away the snow covering the lake, allowing Santa’s reflection to do its fell work. Santa Claus disappeared from the world, leaving Snow Queen the victor in their convoluted contest!
The game ended in an evaluation of the new political balance in Turja: Snow Queen was magically most experienced, primed and insane actor left on the board, so in a very real sense a winner in the game of the gods, ascending to be the leader of her own new pantheon. However, Saana the Giant had proved a great friend of humanity, and the mortal realms had been largely saved from catastrophic damages, so it wasn’t completely one-sided; I ruled the game something of a draw between Saana and Snow Queen, with the mortals all being mild losers (Santa would surely have been a preferable task-master for them, if they had to have one). The newly born Jotun birthed by Staalo Claus, called “Dark Science Vector”, wasn’t an immediate concern, but over medium-to-long time-frames it would come to greatly shape the face of Turja. The future would depend greatly on the long-term interactions between the Snow Queen, Saana and the Vector; with the Queen in a possibly progressive cycle of schitzoid megalomania, the future has its share of shadows.
Faction Grades
I’d like to make some closing remarks on the play exhibited here by the various players. Please don’t take this too seriously, it’s just an experiment in honing the creative agenda — remembering that the game is a purposeful activity. I think that performance evaluation is in some sense a better idea than assigning “victory” in a wargame. It’s not about whether you win, but rather about how well you play.
Everybody
The players were perfectly polite and smart, and as experienced roleplayers largely knew what to do as regards seeking victory within the shared imagined space. I have no complaints about social or technical skills. The differences between performances were mostly about how much time and attention each player had for the game, I think; I’m not judging your intelligence here or anything like that.
Arendelle ⭐
The player faded after the first turn due to a combination of technical and commitment issues. The first moves were perfectly cogent, although agreeing to a trade deal that imperiled the Kingdom’s trade interests in the east, while publicly apologizing for the monarchy’s former policies towards the native peoples, were sure to cause internal difficulties later on. On the other hand, starting a revamp of the Arendellean military was a smart move.
Bjarmia ⭐⭐⭐
The native coalition scraped together from Turjan Sami was a great play that provided a clear context for Bjarmian ambitions. The Great Raid was a risky move that succeeded fully on the operational level, only failing to achieve strategic objectives due to circumstances and enemy action. I’d rate one more star if the diplomacy had been more decisive and the goals more realistic; Vierra may not have been a problem, but neither was she a solution, and she ultimately ignored her base of power in Bjarmia in favour of unqueenly adventuring. As it was, she sidelined herself in a number of ways and therefore limited her influence on the events.
Sariola ⭐⭐
The trade empire play was excellent and the play was generally purposeful and active. However, the read of the overall situation was disastrously awry, to the extent that Sariola ended up militarily sidelined (even the small and distant Bjarm was more relevant!) and prince Nighteyes put his best efforts into a cure that, well, might be worse than any disease it was supposed to treat. The prince is unlikely to live it down when homeland learns of his crucial role in actively supplying the Army of Darkness with necessary victuals in their march against the belowed Santa Claus. Had the enemy not crippled itself so spectacularly, Ear Mountain would have fallen. Spectacular failures, but based more on bold plays running into enemy traps than internal inconsistency.
Santa Claus ⭐⭐⭐
Solid espionage moves. Clever and ambitious R&D play in both magical development and arms manufacture. Diplomacy and grand strategy play in general has to be deemed a failure, as Santa seemingly failed to build alliances with anybody, even factions with vital common interests; the outcome was basically that while Ear Mountain could produce superior armaments, they had few soldiers. The high magic play was solid, with effective choices in many pivot points. The last moves, however, were disastrous. The sense I get is that the uneven performance was mostly due to RL limiting focus on the play, so I don’t place undue weight on the low showings.
Staalo Claus ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Excellent diplomacy play, the very opposite of Santa’s; from a horrible starting position (I mean, he’s literally the Dark Lord here) to informal alliance with two of the mortal kingdoms (and the offer to the third was so good that I count it a diplomatic mistake for Vierra not having accepted it) and a marriage alliance with a more powerful sorceress than himself. The military play was also entirely cogent; while in the strongest position in that regard, Staalo Claus also had the most complexity to deal with, and he proved perfectly able to resolve the core military issue in the scenario, namely supply planning and protecting the supply train. The magical accident killing Staalo Claus on the brink of victory was bad luck, not a player mistake.
Snow Queen ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Best magic play; the player studied source material and asked questions to understand what could be accomplished. Knew more about the magics of most other factions than they did themselves. Avoided the most lethal risks in her own magics. Made the initiative for the extremely effective Polar Night Alliance. Calmly turned the precarious situation around in the end, and while there was dice luck, the opponent had that as well, and only one side had a carefully calculated trap putting the enemy into a hopeless situation.
Saana the Giant ⭐⭐
Very passive play, which isn’t a major sin in itself, but doesn’t showcase ability either. Arguably the most successful faction at the end, with results gained from remaining neutral and allowing others to carry Saana to his goals. I don’t weight the nominal success at the end very highly because it’s only a modest improvement on the starting position, and was mainly due to luck.
Lessons learned
Free kriegspiel is pretty fun! We should do more of this stuff at some point.
The GM is a major bottleneck for this, particularly when conducted as a postal game. It’s not realistic for most GMs to write tens of thousands of words of exposition and turn summaries in conducting the game.
Maintaining a master map that you modify to provide individual views is the way to go.
Monday: Coup de Main #33
Well, that was a lengthy AAR on the Lapfantasy. I’ll try to be less wordy on the D&D stuff…
Monday Coup was more hexcrawling, which is only getting more enjoable as we go. The party was hiking in the Cairn Hills, looking for an abandoned dwarven mine. There was danger (the party camped on top of a troll hole, Saad Maan peed on the trolls, survived to tell the tale), peril (water almost ran out before the party found a spring) and despair (on the brink of success, the orthodox isolationist dwarves surprised the party and forced them to relinquish the mine, which would otherwise have surely belonged in a museum). The party at least got paid (15 GP per head, woo hoo), altough two PCs got captured by the dwarves and hoisted who knows where.
I imagine that next session will involve traipsing back to civilization and then figuring out a new plan for a new adventure.
Session #34 is scheduled for tomorrow, Monday 8.2., starting around 16:00 UTC. Feel free to stop by if you’re interested in trying the game out or simply seeing what it’s like.
Tuesday: Coup in Sunndi #8
The face-to-face campaign fork is still stuck in God that Crawls, which is of course a gift that keeps on giving. Amusingly the party accidentally stumbled on the exact kind of political blackmail material that Master Melchert was looking for in this hell-hole, so the team kinda sorta has achieved the mission objective at the measly price of an incompetent magic-user failing a climbing check and falling to his death.
Another unfortunately useless advancement was the party figuring out the treasure caches. We have some fair amount of treasure piling up, although mapping the place remains saddly a challenge. The party has also become more skilled in manipulating the God. It’s not so bad, as Crawling Chaos goes.
The issue of getting out is still pressing, of course. The party has now spent ~6 hours in the underground. Here’s the supply situation:
Exhaustion check: 2 hours
Light: 1 torch, ~10 shingles
Water: ~18 hours
All in all, I expect them to all perish, but not before they die of thirst in roughly ~40 hours or so. Should be “fun” for one more session in that.
State of the Productive Facilities
Finishing with the Lapfantasy was clearly the watershed. Next week I’ll show you all!