New on Desk #74 — Tournament of Fear

The week’s been pretty mediocre in all regards, I don’t feel like much has changed. The most exciting thing happening was when I decided to crowdsource the quickly approaching tournament arc in the Coup campaign.

How I became a tournament organizer

The Temple of Doom is sort of an evil boarding school. The acolytes of the Temple are stuck there at the pleasure of the principal (high priest) and teachers (faction chiefs), with their only adventuring opportunities those that occur within the Temple or explicitly sponsored by the factions therein.

One of these sponsored adventure events is the “Tournament of Fear”, a martial arts dueling tournament organized by the Grandmaster of the Order of Fear, Sinister Thaal. Thaal’s big on martial glory, so he arranges these tournaments for his knights and squires to get a chance to pawn everybody else, thus bringing glory to the Order.

Little does Thaal realize that this time it’ll be different: some players in our online game got bitten by a character creation bug (I don’t blame them; we have a fun chargen system), so I decided to crowdsource the participants of the upcoming tournament of Fear with them. The parameters of the exercise are:

• At most one 3rd level and a handful of 2nd level contestants per creator, unlimited 1st levelers and non-classed. You’ll get the contestant back afterwards if they survive, so it’s a bit of a special opportunity to start a character at higher level. (Still starts at zero XP, of course.)
• The tournament is meant for rising talent, so Thaal will disqualify anybody who is already famous or a known expert killer, or a member of Temple inner circle. He’s pretty good about spotting not only Level >3, but also more esoteric power like potent artefacts, physical cultivation or the like.
• ~50% of the contestants are expected to be 0th level, most of the rest 1st level, with just a few 2nd–3rd level. ~50% are expected to be members of the Order of Fear (Blackguards and trainees), 30% members of other Temple factions, and 20% outsiders.
• Legal contestants have one soul in the arena at fight start. Magic and weapons are allowed, but pre-created fortifications are not. (Armor is “fortification” if you can’t walk in it.) Otherwise pretty much anything goes, unless Thaal dislikes it, in which case it’s disqualified.
• Fights are to surrender or incapacitation, but there’s no penalty for “accidental” deaths. Temple guarantees competitor physical safety during the tournament, but does not arrange protection for harassment and other hijinks. In fact, they don’t protect your body either, they’ll just avenge any murders afterwards.
• This tournament arc stuff is all some dumb shonen shit, so I’m expecting at least as dumb characters as you’d get in your favourite fighting game. All rules-legal, of course, for all that limits the imagination.

So that’s what Thaal thinks is coming, and he’s prepared to have his prize pupil sweep the stakes with Blackguard stuff, like sword and boarding things to death with maybe some Inflict Harm or Cause Fear. Little does he know that at this writing the mad chargen laboratory has pushed ~40 combatants with a wide variety of character builds. There’s sword and sorcery, lycanthropy and madness, planar travel and firearms galore. A positively Gygaxian reverse-Paladin is, well, quite tame in comparison.

The worst GMing headache so far is probably the one Mage: the Ascension character that’s trying to join the tournament, apparently a player’s old character from some prior campaign. (Said player interprets the “you can bring legit characters from prior campaigns here” campaign standard in a pretty wide way.) I think I’ve managed to set down a conversion theory for them. The various gunmen, dragons, psionicists and other weirdos are easy in comparison. At least we agreed that the Nobilis character would be slightly overpowered (I think I benchmarked them to level 14), so that’s one less to worry about.

A Greyhawk-based casino is setting up a parimutuel betting pool for the tournament, so those who can’t fight can still profit. The house takes 10% off the top, then 50% goes to the backers of the ultimate champion, and 50% to the backers of the semi-final four. Funds are returned for any bets made on targets disqualified before the Running of the Ghouls.

The actual tournament will be played in a few weeks, when the campaign process gets around to it. I’m expecting Temple politics, cheating, fighting game drama, shonen manga like flashback scenes and any player characters participating in this to be utterly crushed. The rules will be highly arbitrary, with weird twists and turns announced during the contest itself instead of in advance, as befits the genre. The prizes are pretty good, though, and it’s still safer than dungeoneering for all that the tournament is being organized by a fantasy-fascist who might as well be commanding Shadaloo.

Sunday: a day hike at Volkov Path

As I mentioned in passing in the last newsletter, I spent most of Sunday on a hike, and most of Monday recovering from said hike. The route is a standard one around here, the best wilderness trail in Sonkajärvi, the Volkov Trail (Volokinpolku). A bit under 30 kilometers, and recently refurnished with new boardwalks too. The weather was perfect for hiking; warm, but the mosquitoes have not yet awoken to pester mankind in these parts.

As everybody knows, my D&D wilderness adventuring rules are perfectly calibrated. This means that I can calculate an approximation of my own Constitution score from how difficult the march was. Let’s see:

The daily travel rate was three hexes (6-mile hex), with one of those hexes hilly. The journey took 12 hours total (with rest stops), so ~3 hours per hex for the flat trails and maybe 4 hours for the hilly hex, with 2 hours of extra rest due to an over-long marching day, all translating to a default pace.

I was carrying ~15 pounds of encumbrance, so nothing particularly notable in that regard. However, being overweight I’m already carrying let’s say ~40 pounds of extra weight on my own, which rather reduces my carrying capacity; I am not quite “lightly encumbered” in the day to day, but with the hiking pack I was. I suppose the rules on this are necessarily pretty binary, I could go either way on whether I was really in the “light” or “none” zone here, and the pack didn’t have much to do with it. Also, I might have STR +1, affecting the carrying capacity.

A CON +0 adventurer should be able to routinely march the ~9 hours it takes to traverse three hexes on unobstructed ground in a day. (I assume 5 days before a day of rest in those circumstances.) The hilly hex at the south end of the trail here slows down travel and generally makes this a CON +1 rate trail. I was pretty worn down at the end; not critically so, but the ol’ feet needed a couple of days to recover thoroughly. I would rather not do a second trip the very next day, but the day after that I would have been good to go. All in all, about the amount of long-term exhaustion as you’d expect from an average CON adventurer. I was at -2 to do anything else at the end of the march due to the exhaustion, but the next day I was merely generally sore.

So that seems to check out. We decided that this is not how out of shape we are, so more hiking is clearly required to improve the situation.

Monday: Coup de Main was on recess

We’ve usually played Coup weekly on Mondays over the last soon-to-be-year, but now and then there’s a skip week. Last Monday became such seemingly by accident; one player had something urgent come up, another decided that they have too much flu, a third actually has other things they could be doing as well, so considering how small the party suddenly is, maybe let’s not play after all?

We did spin out a new character for a player who’d lost a PC in the last session; I thought the new adventurer came out nicely. A Paladin accompanied by a loyal squire.

I just checked, and the first session of the campaign was on 8.6. last year, so we’re actually only a week away from the 1-year anniversary of the campaign. 48 sessions in a single year (plus 24 sessions in a second campaign fork, I suppose) is pretty good pace, apparently we’ve had just four skip weeks through the year. Says something about the insane scope of the game that we’re just getting started on climbing to Name Level here.

Tuesday: Coup in Sunndi #24

The Tuesday game, on the other hand, very much happened. We’ve been crunching our way through the Isle of Dread with the Sunndi crew, and now it was time to go seek the Kopru, the mysterious lost civilization purported to remain on the island. The Sinister Thaal had tasked a few PCs to seek diplomatic relations with them so as to perhaps bring in an outside factor in the upcoming Sunndi civil war.

The expedition was distinct from the dinosaur safari that we’ve been doing for the last few sessions. The players are clearly getting used to tropical adventuring, as the expedition preparation and basic conduct didn’t cause any issues. The general plan involved rowing a boat upriver through a tall canyon punching in-land from the swampy landing grounds that the party has been favouring when visiting the island.

We amusingly found that while the dinosaur safari team has had somewhat scant dino sightings, they seem to be much more common in these parts. We may have been looking for dinosaurs too south, all told.

Even when everything is planned well, a disaster can well strike, and such was the situation when the party discovered a majestic mesa rising up to 300 feet high deep in the interior of the island. Apparently the high cliff is home to several pteranodons, giant flying carnivorous dinosaurs. At 5 HD a pop, two of them defending their territory and looking for a snack were a disastrous encounter for the small one-boat expeditionary team. With half of the party quickly slain in the aerial, riverine, jungle encounter, the rest counted their lucky stars for still having a functional boat and turned quickly back towards home. They’d gained a fair chunk of XP for all the dinosaurs they’d met on the way anyway, so lesson learned!

One of the characters on the adventure actually gained their 3rd level in this travesty, so you could even call it a victory. A Thief, but still. One day they’ll be a trained Blackguard, and then enemies of all that is even slightly fascist beware!

State of the Productive Facilities

I wrote a bit of Muster, maybe 500 words, but otherwise didn’t really get much done this week for whatever reason. Can’t quite pin down the cause, aside from my being generally lazy. Better luck next week!