New on Desk #64 — Art Gallery Week

The week’s been routine, but I figured out a fun feature article nevertheless. Check it out!

The adventures of Sipi the Stippler

Sipi tends to draw at the game table, which is pretty impressive considering he’s doing core leadership activities as well more often than not. Here’s some quick character studies he’s made of central characters in the Coup in Sunndi campaign:

So that’s fun. I think having Bootsie imaged in particular added to the game considerably in the place and time, as the players might not have had a clear image of what “middle-aged slave soldier” + “captain of the guard in Sunndi” + “big-ass hero” might look like in practice, particularly with my deciding to call the Prince’s Guard “Sriracha Mamelukes” on account of their rooster heraldry.

Sipi’s illustration of The Trio was true to life in that those three characters did indeed adventure together for one session, I think. Considering that Cultist and Bootsie were the main PCs of Sipi and Antti respectively, while Nold was Mauri’s, maybe he should have included Nold instead of the Forester, who has admittedly survived pretty well.

That reminds me, I’ve forgotten to tell the players that Forester should have a bonus die to hit points on account of being, well, a Forester. (The class is basically like Ranger without the combat skills; a wilderness-oriented skill monkey. They gain a bonus hit die similar to Ranger for being inured to rough living.) Well, clearly he’s making do.

Cultist at Rest: his rise to fame

So anyway, what actually sent Sipi’s career on a rising arc was when his character Cultist came back from God That Crawls a rich yet disturbed man. Cultist is, as his name might suggest, a graduate of the Temple of Doom. He hears the Song of the Demogorgon. Trained in the dark arts by none other than the Sinister Thaal, a famous Blackguard, Cultist scorns the use of demonic Power to assuage his conscience. As a truly disciplined man he prefers the juice of the poppy.

Cultist, as part of his plotting, decided to increase his esteem in the court of Eyedrin by commissioning a personal portrait from a lesser-known local artist, Sipi the Stippler. The painting, Cultist at Rest, was an intimate character study in the high ironic style greatly favoured in traditional Sunndian high art; while perhaps caricaturesque or even grotesque to us, the Sunndians consider it a mark of character for a person of quality to sponsor jest at their own expense. Jest, and rich expensive colors out of the reach of the lower castes. Sipi delivered in spades.

The Stippler had never amounted to much in his artistic career, which isn’t surprising when you consider Sunndi’s demographics; there simply isn’t much work in the fine arts to be had outside of the far northern royal court. Cultist paid for his paints, though, and when Sipi got his chance, he astounded the palace of Eyedrin with his personable, emotionally vivacious work. The Prince himself has been heard muttering about the haunting gaze of the painting, haunted in turn by what he must have seen on his adventures.

Unfortunately for Sipi the Stippler (Sipi-the-player’s diegetic alter ego — dare I say it, a player character), you don’t gain experience points in Coup by mere occupational accomplishment. (NB: if this was Amber Diceless you totally would gain Points for the art.) However, at least he got to his chance for patronage: the Prince himself commissioned a work for the palace’s rotunda from the newly fashionable artist. Sipi toiled over and entire game session in Doylist terms, and for an entire week in Watsonian perspective, and did indeed produce a fair design plan for a festively princely piece. Subtly mocking, but perhaps with less savageness, as is only appropriate when it comes to criticizing the vanity of the Light of Our Lives and Keeper of Peacocks.

(Prince Ali, it is said, owns the most peacocks. At least it’s a fact that any player character who’s up for a reward from Prince Ali and doesn’t ask otherwise will get like 50% of the award paid in peacocks. The players seem to prefer it when he gives them magic item gifts, the philistines.)

Bootsie at Death: boldly familiar at court

Sipi the Stipplers artistic endeavours in the service of the Prince would continue, although the rotunda would remain unfinished for the time being when the court was shocked by more pressing, even disastrous news: Muck Boots, Prince Ali’s personal arms-slave, champion and captain of his guard, Captain Bootsie to his underlings and boon companions, had fallen in battle against the dark fae of the up-country!

After spending three days and nights completely distraught, the young Prince commissioned Sipi for a fresco to honor the man and the legend. Sipi’s Bootsie at Death again displayed the Stippler’s trademark-like depth of research and understanding of human emotion. The astonished faint of Bootsie’s secret countryside wife, the manly grief of his trusted batsman…

Depicting the Prince himself carrying the fallen hero’s feet in pieta astonished the court; in the conservative land of Sunndi it was a bold move to elevate the Shiracha brotherhood of soldiers to pride of place over their Prince, even in mere painting. They are slaves, after all! There were whispers of a coming punishment to the brash paints-dabbler, but it never came… perhaps the Prince secretly agreed with the painting’s deep symbolism, or was simply still too agrieved to really pay attention to goings-on at court. Everybody certainly knows that the Prince has hardly shown his face since Bootsie’s death in public, preferring the company of his spoony bard to the broader community of the palace.

Sparrow at Work: Stippler flies too close to the moon?

Perhaps emboldened by the lack of punishment after his controversial Bootsie at Death, the Stippler soon began on a new major work concerning a rather darker subject matter… Sipi desired to capture nothing less than the mysterious presence of the royal inquision in paints on canvas. Not something to speak of openly, for sure, as the royal agents are status-conscious outsiders whose powers and authorities are intentionally reserved from the common man. It is considered imprudent to even address one directly, and use of their name would be beyond the pale; to paint one into art would be a first.

Part of the reason for the Stippler’s lack of judgement in this matter may be found in the unfinished rotunda; one imagines that the Prince is hardly of the mood to see his festively embossed, gold-leaf decorated personality cult piece, complete with a musical soundtrack tastefully performed in the background, finished and published in this time of grief. While Sipi the Stippler wouldn’t be left bereft of food and shelter, one suspects he found himself at loose ends after finishing Bootsie at Death.

The royal agents are all either elves, inhuman in their beauty and perfection of judgement, or failing that, then men obscured behind ritual masks. Each elf — and mask — uses a false name fit for human tongues. Royal agents are considered to be of the Fae Caste in terms of social privilege and law regardless of their actual provenance.

Sparrow at Work is an angry, distressed piece, an unexpected diversion from the Stippler’s known penchant for character study. It is a depiction of battle, not an unknown topic in Sunndian art, but the shocking murk and bloody “mud and shit” aesthetic is hardly normative. The centerpiece character is unmistakably a royal agent hidden behind their caste mask; the distinctive sword leaves no doubt that the portrayal is that of the “Sparrow”, one of the five inquisitors who descended on Eyedrin only two weeks before the reveal of the painting.

Rumour has it that the Stippler would have sat with the Basic Sunndian adventurers and steeped them in drink to fish for details of their last week’s adventure with the mysterious Sparrow. Needless to say, the entire event depicted is highly illicit: if something of the sort had happened, the inquisitor would surely have sworn all survivors to absolute secrecy.

Sipi the Stippler has since disappeared from public. My guess is that the inquisition got him, so we perhaps shouldn’t expect to see any further art from this bold, productive young painter.

Monday: Coup de Main #38

As discussed last time, the Yggsburg-based core party (I don’t quite know if it has a name, but it’s the party led by the dynamic duo of Rob Banks and Phun Eral, with their associated associates) got a dumb quest about finding a cow somewhere at an undead-infested spooky farm, and milking said cow for some probably not nefarious at all purposes. A classical fetch quest. The distance involved in the fetch is considerable, as the party has to travel through half of Selintan Valley and deep into the Mistmarsh to reach the target location. I assume that the milk will have a fair chance to spoil before they make it back, although the journey downriver will probably be pretty quick.

The high point of the expedition prep was when Phun started carving protective amulets for the party. Did you know that a Cleric can do that? I did, but the other players probably didn’t, what with the learn by doing magic system. Interesting stuff, one more thing to work on during downtime. As it was, Phun had time to craft two amulets before the party had to leave.

(The protective amulet is basically a specialized type of holy symbol, if you’d like to think of it that way. Phun’s home temple happened to have a bit of a cottage industry in specifically this, so Phun knows how to carve Protection from Undead amulets. On their own their effect is pretty modest, but add some Power and they should prove pretty useful.)

The party has had long-term difficulties retaining hirelings, but Rob did manage to scare up a single hireling in Yggsburg. Probably have more luck next year; seems like Yggs is pretty tapped out of random death-wishing fools for this summer.

On the other hand, the party had the good fortune of finding a new retainer for Phun in the first larger village they passed through on their way towards Mistmarsh. We’re playing with full retainer rules in Coup, and the players are slowly starting to appreciate them as their characters reach mid-levels: retainers gain level alongside their mains, so running a retainer/sidekick with your main character is a great way to work up relevant help.

(You might remember that Phun lost his last retainer, Rhet the Retrainer, in the Astral adventure, after Frida smartly decided to stab him to death rather than leave him for demons. Phun’s been wishing to stumble upon a Fighter-type bodyguard retainer.)

Phun’s new retainer is a Fighter-type, as he desired. “Strawhead” (Straw-hat? something like that) is a brisk and brave country boy who became a 1st level Fighter when he rescued his little sister from a river crocodile. (I thought this an amusing call-back; the earlier party saw some rare crocodiles in the river a while back.) Because Phun has a negative CHA modifier, we formally know that there is some kind of social chemistry issue with the new retainer. Hint: it’s that he’s brash and doesn’t listen to orders.

(Design-wise, I think that having retainer play relate to CHA is one of my favourite old D&D conceits. It’s a real and useful advantage you can get from a high CHA. The way this works in Coup is that you can hold at most your CHA bonus in loyal retainers at once — or “double-slot” a single retainer to make them fanatically loyal. Characters without a CHA bonus can have retainers, but the more penalty you have, the less of “loyal and competent” you get to have. Low CHA characters can work on their retainer issues over the long term, improving the retainer’s “stage”, but that’s just working hard to achieve what high CHA gets you for free.)

The campaign does pretty careful time-keeping, which combined with character stables means that the players are well capable of having their characters adventure side-by-side chronologically. This adventure happens in the month of Flocktime (June) and has the distinction of happening pretty concurrently with the last adventure we had in the Mistmarsh, with the dwarf escort mission some ~5 sessions back. The dwarf escort party left about a week in advance of this party, going to the same general direction. Same players, different characters.

This overlap wouldn’t ordinarily matter much, but it just so happens that in session #32 the party experienced a remarkably powerful summer storm while travelling in the eastern parts of Mistmarsh. While this was going on, ~50 miles west, this second party is going on their own adventure… so yeah, obviously they’re stumbling into the same storm-front, maybe half a day delayed or so.

I think the players knew on some level that this was happening, but they screen their own meta information so hard that I think that some of them were surprised when the storm descended upon them. A solid success on weather awareness gave the party roughly an hour of forewarning, which was definitely a good thing, as they needed to get off the river and build some shelter. At this point in the game we are perfectly aware of how serious this survival business can get, so the play around camping procedures was pleasantly tense. I should make a point of writing up some of this stuff for the Coup Workbook Partials (probably the hexcrawling booklet), I assume that most D&D campaigns don’t go quite so deep into the minutiae of storm shelter construction that we do.

(In case you’re wondering about the stakes: constant long-term rain can cause even the mild Selintan Valley summer temperatures to drop to the chill temperatures of the rain-water itself. Humans exposed to e.g. ~7 °C, drenched wet, over several days, are well in hypothermia range.)

So the adventurers built this reasonably sturdy shelter out of their boats, bubblegum and good will, and settled down to survive the winds and rain. It was quite idyllic, and by idyllic I mean awful: there was room for eight people in the shelter, and there were seven people in there, so space was at a premium. The party didn’t have time to create major ground insulation, which quickly meant that great amounts of water flew into and out of the shelter, drenching everything in ground contact. There was no room for a fire, nor firewood for that matter. The weather outside quickly became so hazardous, with the cutting winds and drenching rain, that the party preferred to pee inside. Amusingly the teenage witch Frida held her composure quite well for the circumstances, and even managed to raise the spirits of the murderhobo crew somewhat.

The fundamental issue here is that everybody is perfectly aware that the last time we played through this storm, it lasted for like a week, and only got worse as it went on. If it plays like that this time, the party easily has time to have their shelter collapse on them, or die of hypothermia, or whatnot. As it is, the shelter quality vis-a-vis the wind is at a stage where everybody has to make a CON check every day to not lose a hit point. (Some of these guys don’t have very many hit points…)

We spent the rest of the session working on a hail mary play revolving around Phun’s relatively potent yet so far under-utilized divine magic. (Because the game codifies stuff as we go, the “relatively under-utilized” means that we got lots of interesting new rules application.) We learned that one of the Wee Jas myth cycles Phun knows by heart, the Mistress of Magic legendarium, includes a 2nd level Resist Elements spell that Phun tried on himself — seems to protect from cold-wet hypothermia! So Phun at least got a good night’s sleep.

(There’s more to the spell exploitation issue, of course, it quite nicely combines various facets of the magic rules that haven’t seen much play yet. Ultimately, if Phun is to save everybody from the storm by mass casting Resist Elements, he’ll need to either
a) spend all his waking time casting it individually on people;
b) go out and somehow manage a magic circle despite the storm to cover the entire shelter with the spell;
c) amass ~20 Power Points to cast the spell on everybody at once, for a long enough time to be relevant.)

All in all, I liked the session. Not many events per se, but we got to apply various rules systems. It would also be amazing if I manage to kill the entire party with a sudden summer storm. As it is, the party has to decide whether they’re going to stick with the shelter in the morning, or if they’ll try to brave the storm and travel back some 5 miles to reach the last village on their route. There are pros and cons.

Tuesday: Coup in Sunndi #13

Our face-to-face Coup in Iisalmi was a weird double-feature session: we started first one adventure, then a second one, with different characters participating in each. This was largely caused by Sipi having to leave half-way into the session, while Antti only get to the session half-way through, and each of these players happened to sit on their respective adventure hooks, so first Sipi took one party through his adventure, then Antti took a second party through his. I hope this wasn’t too confusing for the one newcomer player we had as well; I could see the entire process being confusing to come into in the middle, as both adventures were something that had been foreshadowed heavily in the past.

I, on the other hand, like how both adventures are shaping out. They’re both relatively unusual and both prepped by myself from organic campaign events. Challenging gaming material to present and usefully play out, but I think we’ve had a good start on both adventures here.

Business at the Temple of Doom

The first adventure concerns an exciting and scary journey to the Temple of Doom, the primary cesspit of demonic villainy in Sunndi. Cultist, one of the player characters, is from there, so he knows roughly how to get to the place. The Beast Society, our evil adventuring party, is interested in visiting the Temple to bring them politically dangerous blood libel literature for further distribution, in the hopes of contributing to Sunndi being destroyed altogether.

The travel from the southern princedom of Eyedrin to the Temple was of some remark simply for using 30-mile hexes (very rare in my play; our hexcrawling is usually on the 6-mile scale), but mostly this adventure is all about the Temple of Doom itself. Here are some basic precepts for the place:

It’s a tangle of cults rather than a single-church megaplex. My basic conceit here is that the Temple was formed during the imperial era in response to heavy government pressures against particularly loathsome cults and religions. The cults forming up the temple stick together out of fear of the dominant Lawful and Good elements in Sunndian society. The place is secret, but surprisingly large, with several hundred denizens in a dozen smaller cults ranging the gamut from Lawful Evil to Chaotic Neutral. The perfect place for some bloody court intrigue, tournament arcs or similar activities.

The map is based on a video game, specifically Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom MSX port from ’87. (Just a random map I found for that.) The video game map has to be interpreted rather metaphorically, of course, but once you key it a bit, it’ll serve to show major monster and prisoner locations in the temple.

The cults are just the Legion of Doom from the ’70s DC superhero cartoons. Specifically, I took a membership roster and converted each supervillain into their Flanaessian equivalent as 4th–8th level cult leaders. Everybody gets some cultists to boss around as well, of course, and a specific cave on the map of the temple to live in, and some specific local ideological elements.

Each cult boss has adventurous interests, so the PC adventurers crashing into the place have plenty of opportunities to work for and with those cults they wish to. And of course working with some implies hostility to others, so the players will have to be careful about the political moves they make.

Truly, a masterpiece of design, that’s what this adventure is. I mean, for the amount of time I put into detailing the highly intricate premise, it’s worked quite fine so far. Admittedly we’ve only just scratched the surface: the party chose to approach the Temple by wandering in the surrounding jungles in search of the location, which resulted in them stumbling upon some of the primitive tribesmen controlling the surrounding terrain. As the initial contact proved positive, the party got the opportunity to be introduced to the ruler of the cannibals: Khata, a ferocious Chaotic Evil were-panther cannibal bestial nudist. (Basically your average D&D murderhobo, she.) We left the follow-up for next session, but assuming the party manages to convince Khata, the plan is to get inside the Temple and then, well, figure out a way to get out alive as well I guess. Should be a trip, just check out that Legion of Doom roster.

Who murdered Earen-Raven?

The second half of the session was very different, as now we were running a Good party (at least, nobody’s admitting otherwise) led by a Lawful Good Paladin tasked with discovering the murderer of the fair Earen-Raven Ulthas, the elven witch known to the public simply as “Raven”. While said paladin was dungeoneering in the last session, parties unknown entered into her rooms and brutally slew the elven princess, leaving the entire inquisitorial team uncertain of their safety and the political leanings of the Eyedrinian princedom. With what I’ve come to understand about the demographics of Sunndi, it could be outright catastrophic for the kingdom if the Prince of Eyedrin has decided to turn against the Elvenking!

So this adventure’s a murder mystery, and we’re playing a mystery scenario au naturel, which basically means that the players will actually have to do their own research to collect clues, and their own thinking to formulate the solution; there’s no game abstraction layer doing the thinking for them. (If this seems like a mode of gaming that often goes awry, then you share my experience; let’s see how it goes this time around.) I think we got the basic facts on what’s happened and how pretty well in the first session. Some good whodunnit stuff, I think, check it out:

Earen-Raven was alone at night, in her rooms at the palace, when it happened. She had sent the guards at the door away earlier, as the inquisitors would sometimes do, but the entire wing of the palace was generally speaking guarded by the inquisition’s own men. No servants entered her rooms after she went there herself.

The body was found before noon, so the death occurred sometime between say midnight and morning hours. The discovery was made by servants. The body has been examined by another inquisitor, but because she’s a woman and a NPC we don’t trust her; unfortunately we haven’t been able to convince her to break taboos in the matter to let the PCs take a look yet. The body had a strange black goop fillings its mouth.

There were signs of struggle, with several assailants. Faerie nails, a brutish local anti-fae armament typical of commoners, were used, as were bladed weapons. A closet had been emptied in the room for an unknown reason. Footprints were discovered outside the window, suggesting that the assailants would have escaped the scene that way.

There might be a political time limit, as “Hawk”, the leader of the inquisitorial party could possibly jump the gun and start lethally censuring the princedom of Eyedrin for causing the death of the precious, irreplaceable, immortal sister of his. Elves and their grief, eh; one of the human inquisitors is explicitly hastening a burial to give Hawk a less socially catastrophic way to mourn. Current estimate is that Hawk will make a sanity check around midnight.

It’s not enough to solve the case yet, of course, but the players seem to be teeming with ideas for how to gather more information, so they’re clearly making progress. It’s 4pm or so after the first couple of cycles of investigation, so the players still have some time to collect information and make conclusions before I even get to make a single teeny-tiny check about whether a royal cousin starts griefing at the mortals in the vicinity. Fun times.

State of the Productive Facilities

The week wasn’t the most productive, I wrote ~500 words of Muster. That’s under requirements. I pinpoint the cause as random variability combined with my generally low productivity; I had a few good days to work, with just a bit of wood-chopping related distraction, but I accidentally spent the good writing time sermonizing the Agora over the creative strengths and weaknesses of old TSR products instead of working.

The current productivity goal is to write 1000 words per week, and my actual dream is 1000 words per sitting. I have strong confidence that the numbers will improve as I get deeper into the manuscript, it’s just a matter of not sabotaging my writing days with actually unnecessary distractions. More Triumph of Will into it, ugh!