New on Desk #110 — Dhalmond Outlaws

I skipped the planned Wednesday newsletter, so you’re getting it now. The reason is a mundane family business thing; my brother-in-law, publican and restauranteur, has been sick, and I’ve been filling in at the restaurant. I guess the couple hours of that every day have mostly gnawed at my schedules because of how it interrupts my beauty sleep. I’m such a greenhouse flower, can’t hack it in a day job.

My new bounty hunting adventure

I’ll tell you about this new adventure I created for our tabletop Coup de Main game. It’s a simple idea very typical of sandbox D&D, more focused on inter-relativity with the campaign setting than about being a complex setpiece on its own. Structurally fairly novel, I think; not a dungeon, not a hexcrawl, not a mystery investigation per se.

The concept of the Dhalmond Outlaws bounty hunting adventure is that the chaotic period of anarchy in the principality of Dhalmond has encouraged a number of remarkable colorful rogues, outlaws, criminals and other bad guys to engage in high profile crime waves. The government, too weak and harried by bigger problems, has instituted bounties on the worst and particularly provably criminal individuals. Enter the adventurers: they’re the kind of people who are willing to home assault just about anybody even without a bounty, so this should be a great exercise for them!

I was obviously inspired here by the video game storytelling device common in the ’80s beat’em ups and run’n guns and such games. It was a common trope back then for the game’s protagonist to be a bounty hunter who’s fighting their way through criminal gangs to reach the gang boss, who would have a bounty on their head. I took particular inspiration from Sunset Riders, a classic arcade game along these veins, going as far as to adapt all the bosses from the game as bounties for Dhalmond. The titular Sunset Riders get to be a competing adventuring party looking to pick up all the juiciest bounties before the PC adventurers get a chance!

However, first the adventurers need to find their prey. Here’s how I envision the cyclical structure of the bounty hunting adventure:

1. I’ve prepared a number of outlaws, detached from particular time and place for now. (I got a lot of help from other players in the campaign, it was a group effort!) They’re each mainly defined by class/level, criminal style, some particular assets, and the starting bounty.
2. At the beginning of every month, as long as anarchy continues in Dhalmond, 2d6 outlaws are bountied in the principality. If this is more than last month, the government has managed to identify and prosecute new targets. If it’s less, one or more of last month’s bounties may have fled the country, or the bounty otherwise lapses. (I think at most one bounty per month will lapse in this way. Makes the numbers less bouncy from month to month.)
3. Each bountied outlaw focuses on a specific activity each month, as rolled randomly and secretly by the GM. This produces a timeline of action for what they’ve been doing recently, and where they are right now. This may just generally produce content (e.g. rumours), and it’s ultimately important for actually finding a given outlaw. It’s much more difficult to find somebody who’s laying low in the countryside, for example, than somebody who’s on an amok run in town.
4. The players on their part, study the Wanted posters for any outlying bounties and, if they like what they see, may invest time and effort into locating and capturing (dead or alive, often enough!) the individual called for. No pressure, this is a sandbox campaign; we have other adventures we can go on.
5. The actual run of the bounty hunting investigation begins by investigation play stuff: asking around, following clues, being lucky ultimately results in the adventurers succeeding or failing in figuring out where and how to best catch their man. It’s part of the skill challenge here to perceive the effort/risk/profit ratios of going after various targets. Some may be too dangerous, others too difficult to find, and yet others with too low bounties to be worth it.
6. When the PCs have an idea of where to go, they can travel to the hideout and have a bracing swordfight with the bad guy, or whatever.

To support the adventure scheme here, I created a specific type of handout sheet for the outlaws. I’ve got like 30 of these NPCs to write up, and haven’t done them all yet, but I included an example individual here. As you can see, the sheet’s to be cut into halves so the GM gets the secret stuff and the adventurers get the public profile page. The idea is that the players can use this same sheet for notes-keeping during the investigation, and they can refer back to them later when considering whether the bounties might be worth going after after all.

So yeah, I’m pretty excited about this because of how it seems like a fairly gameable wargamey adventurous type of adventure that doesn’t rely on location like dungeons do. Non-dungeon adventure is common in trad adventure games, but those are also basically always constructed as non-dynamic GM plot presentations, so that doesn’t help me any when developing the oeuvre of possible adventures in D&D. This type of thing, on the other hand, might. The material seems fairly context-free, too; I can use the outlaws left over after we pacify Dhalmond or leave it to its fate in other locations beset by peak criminality.

We fielded the Dhalmond Outlaws material last Tuesday, so I’ll discuss that in a bit. First, though, I’ll need to get out of the play report backlog from the last couple of sessions of the campaign. So I guess this is an actual play report newsletter, a three-for-one deal!

AP Report Pile: Coup in Sunndi #46

Right, so last time the party had been on two trips into Quasqueton, the bunker-castle of two crazy coot high-level adventurers, Rogarn and Zelligarn. They’d found some nice loot, such as a full-size mirror and a fair condition bear fur and so on. Unfortunately luxurious for how the prices of luxuries in Dhalmond have steadily crept down during the on-going civil unrest.

The party would otherwise have been totally ready to keep adventuring here, but they were running low on food, so time to head back to some civilization to get food. Sipi, as a veteran adventurer, had set up the party in advance by finding a small farming village reasonably close by. A veritable thorp (check out Wikipedia on what that word means), greatly suffering in the ravages of the Dhalmond Troubles (that might be a good name for their issues?), the place has just like ~40 people living there anymore, but at least they’re friendly, or at least unwilling to cause trouble to armed and dangerous adventurers.

So good enough, the party brings their heavy loot stuff to the thorp of Vieremä (as it was named for book-keeping purposes) and tries to buy some food from the locals. They could spare like five man-days of food or something like that, disappointingly little. So travel to Dhaltown (the capital of the principality) for the best food availability in this sad country, or what?

After due deliberation, the party decided to leave their loot at the thorp for now and go back to Quasqueton. Perhaps otherwise a tad risky (or at least inefficient) plan, for scarcity of food, but they had a lucky random encounter with a wild boar! The party constable may have had a good scare, but at least the food situation got solved neatly and immediately when the ravenous adventurers charged the angry boar.

After that we finally got back to the meat of the matter, namely wandering the empty halls of Quasqueton. As I’ve consistently remembered to tell you every time I mention this adventure, Quasqueton is a creepy place with massive amounts of empty hallways, barely any monsters or treasure, but surprisingly atmospheric room descriptions. Like, this time we found a mysterious giant mushroom garden, a throne room, a room with magical pools… all sorts of things. Mostly empty, with just barely enough monsters and lootable things that I can’t call it an entire dungeon of nothing at all.

One of the adventurers got so thirsty for action that while others were exploring a secret room (good instincts on them, finding it; I guess careful mapping does help), he chose to outright go swim in one of those mysterious magical pools in the next room over. Lucky for him, it was a pool of delicious wine, so getting thoroughly drunk was the only consequence of note.

So yeah, basic dungeoneering stuff again. Moving on, next session was more consequential.

AP Report Pile: Coup in Sunndi #47

This time we had an unusually small group, just me and a couple of hardcore regulars. Back at the end of the last session the party had finally gone to the effort of returning to Dhaltown to sell loot and get food. Good thing, as that made it easy for the two PCs to hire up a bunch of hirelings to help them continue delving Quasqueton.

Going to most dungeons with a team of two PCs and four NPCs would be fairly foolhardy, but Quasqueton could be cleared by a little girl with a pony, so whatever. The party was considerably more concerned over the Completely Reliable nature of the hireling contingent. They were veritable adventurer types, with just that glint in their eyes that you get by being a loose hand in a town in the grips of civil unrest and famine. You’d think that the PCs would be right at home, but for some reason the murderhobos only trust other PCs, not NPCs who are just like them. One wonders.

Anyway, back at the dungeon (Quasqueton is like two days of travel from Dhaltown, doesn’t need to be a massive deal to hexcrawl — particularly if you know the path well enough to not get lost), the party went back to exploring the place. Found Zelligar the Unknown’s bedroom, an armory… really, the big fat major prize that we found was a +2 spear! It’s the biggest fatstack magic item that we’ve seen in the campaign, and it was just lying there!

To be specific, thanks to the random nature of the dungeon, this is what we know of that spear: it’s just listed laconically as “+2 spear” in the text, as one does; it was found in the seemingly abandoned barracks room; the GM in their infinite wisdom decided that the spear has a blue steel blade and silver socket bandings, and that it was found in a custom rack next to the bed closest to the shitting hole at the corner of the barracks. Must be a story in that.

It was amusing how avaricious Sipi’s no-name character got over the spear. I think they — the spear and the adventurer — had a real harmonization process going! The adventurer was at first keen to claim the spear, then keen to prove his heroic leadership, keen to be the first to go into danger… I think the spear was affecting him, as it was in fact the spear of a chosen hero of a particularly wuxia kind, desiring a perfectionist, manly (but in a Chinese way) wielder. Good play in terms of getting the item to open up to him.

The party’s big plan was that now that they’d gotten the upper floor of Quasqueton mostly explored, they’d next go down the stairs and see what the dread second floor holds. I imagine that part of the motivation here must have been a conviction that this place would surely have some kind of a point to it — surely it can’t just be five miles of 10 foot wide corridors with the occasional bedroom with a lonely orc hiding in there in between?

(Well guys, sometimes that’s what adventures are. Variety is the spice of life!)

We were quick to learn that the second floor involved some kind of mining operation, perhaps penetrating into natural caverns. Or maybe it’s just the Quasqueton kooks expanding their already gigantic bunker with more empty hallways. Either way, it started similar to the upper level but for the more organic nature of the tunnels… but then the carrion crawler attacked.

The carrion crawler is the single most dangerous low-level monster in orthodox D&D monster listings, easy. With 8 attacks, paralyzing touch and the size of a pony (like 3 or 4 HD, I forget), a single carrion crawler is well capable of defeating the entire party. It is, in fact, a solo encounter.

So of course the Quasqueton carrion crawler is a pussy 1 HD version, following the general principle that you can’t possibly lose against anything in there… thinking about it afterwards, maybe I should have assumed decreased reach for this unusually small carrion crawler? The adventure text doesn’t suggest anything like that, but it’d be logical to think that maybe it’s like the size of a human limb instead of a pony, if it has less HD than usual. But then, still having 8 attacks (instead of one attack with itty-bitty tentacles) would argue that it’s the same size, just not as robust.

Anyway, the only real weakness of the carrion crawler is that it’s slow and clumsy in its movements. You can usually run away, or kite it with missile weapons from afar if you absolutely have to try to do that in a dark and cramped underground space. So no problem most of the time, really, despite its overwhelming melee power.

Here’s where a fun detail from before comes in: the party had been wasting hours upon hours mapping all those empty corridors upstairs, so they were running low on torches. We’ve been playing with pretty good light discipline lately, so the party would usually have two or three torches up at a time, replacing them ever half an hour, so that racks up.

The big-brain adventurer solution for running low on torches was to make their own in between finding that magic spear and going downstairs for more dungeoneering. They didn’t have pitch or anything of the sort to work with, so their torches (more like just pieces of hard furniture wood maybe with some cloth wrappings or whatnot) ended up kinda sucky: just 10 feet of clear light, about half the usual torch.

Often this lightning stuff doesn’t matter much; I even get many people telling me that they don’t evaluate it at all when refereeing. (Fair, I’m not saying that you have to; if that’s not the game for you, then it isn’t.) Mostly you can just have the characters move closer to whatever it is they want to take a careful look at, or whatever.

However, as it happens, your light reach is critical when it comes to avoiding carrion crawlers! The crawler started moving towards the party as it saw their lights, but being fairly quiet itself (the crawler doesn’t walk so much as it crawls), it managed to get perilously close before the party had any hint. In fact, it succeeded in an ambush check!

The party had five heads at this point (one of the NPCs had gotten a bit exhausted by the travails earlier), so they were overpowering the crawler quite nicely in terms of HD. Most were armored enough to have high AC against the crawler; the AC math I use grants even light armor a high AC bonus against non-penetrating weapons, and it doesn’t come much less penetrating than the crawler stinger tentacles. Basically, 10% hit chance per tentacle for the most part.

However, the party were also ambushed, which is rather deadly in this rules system; the carrion crawler had several rounds to do its grizzly work before the characters even understood what sort of horrible death was working in their midst. The stinger whips of the crawler did no damage outright, but they caused saves vs paralyzation, for which most PCs had only ~30% odds, and the NPCs even less. The entire party ended up paralyzed by the carrion crawler!

The situation entered into total horror story territory now, as I located the carrion crawler’s nest nearby and started calculating dragging speeds; the crawler wanted to get its prey into the nest, to be slowly digested while kept helpless with its neural poison. So the carrion crawler picked one victim at random, started slowly dragging them away, leaving the rest to struggle with the numbing poison in the light of their quickly dimming torches. 20 minute round trip for the slow creature, because of course it would be coming back to get all the prey into the nest!

One of the PCs, the sturdy barbarian type, managed to shake the paralyzation while the crawler was away; hope flared! But no, he wouldn’t stick around to fight, the adventurer wisely escaped (in a random direction, in the dark dungeon) while the crawler came back and picked another victim to drag to its nest. This time the other PC, incidentally.

High stakes and horrible situation, but a ridiculously clumsy and limited opponent. The barbarian decided that he needed a torch to have a chance of finding his way out of Quasqueton, so he crawled back in the dark to search for one and light it. Must have been horrible for his allies, impeded from speaking by their stiffened tongues, hearing and feeling the free man groping around, all the time guessing or knowing what fate awaited them.

The torch-fumbling was quite exciting, as the barbarian wouldn’t know in the dark when the crawler would be back. There was even some rolls for whether the crawler might forget to get the rest of its prey after having already worked hard to drag back two victims. But it was an industrious little bugger!

Meanwhile, the barbarian finally decided to be a hero once in his miserable life: the other PC, not to speak of the hirelings, depended on him! Besides, with +5 to attack and a ridiculously clumsy target, with him wielding a massive two-handed sword, surely he could just one-shot the damn worm? Assuming he got this torch to light… ah, there it was! Light, enough to see the dread beast coming.

The barbarian lit up two torches and threw them into tactical locations, then hid himself a bit further back, planning to surprise the carrion crawler when it passed the torches and presented a clear target.

Successful ambush, but just one round of surprise (I think there was a DEX penalty here). One would be enough, a 1 HD crawler couldn’t possibly survive a direct him from one of these big-sword bully barbs. Rolling 8+ would suffice, in fact, even with the crawler’s spongy and thick skin. So of course that’s a miss.

Well, initiatives then… and the barbarians wins initiative, so another chance to one-shot the beast before it gets a turn! But no, apparently rolling an 8 is too hard sometimes. And now it was the crawler’s turn, 8 tentacles… one hits, a failed save (the barbarian had what, 60% chance to succeed on that one) and down he goes again.

We ultimately faded to black, giving up on the party. Apparently, even with my fairly generous carrion crawler interpretation (with it dragging victims off and all), the party was just doomed to be TPK’d by Quasqueton!

So that was our Quasqueton adventure for the moment. We might go back there later, but next session was this week’s, so I’m finally up to date on reporting on this campaign. And this week we didn’t go back to Quasqueton…

Tuesday: Coup in Sunndi #48

Knowing that a change of scenario might do good after last week’s traumatic total party kill against the carrion crawler, I’d prepared my Dhalmond Outlaws materials. With three players this time we had a bit stronger party taking on the challenges of bounty hunting.

Of course, as per the campaign’s basic structure, the players had choices here. I just suggested that they might want to look at my adventure hook stuff, and if it didn’t please, we could do something else. Particularly good when the actual adventure was so very, very random-content as this one.

I started by introducing a couple of standing bounties: the Dhalmond central government (the office of the Great Dhalmuti, the queen, as it were) has offered large bounties (10k and 20k + peerage respectively) for any private individuals brave enough to challenge and defeat two of the larger gangs that have been terrorizing the countryside. The Ticotaco Bandits (cultish highwaymen) and the Rapala Bandits (peasant rebellion) aren’t really bounty hunting in the sense I’m looking at here (they’re more like traditional dungeon assaults), but thematically they fit here, so I put in some extra incentive in case the adventurers might want to go that way in the future.

The 2d6 roll to find out how many individual outlaw bounties would be out showed snake eyes, so we would have only two options to pick from this month: Kill-Yah Princess of Flowers and Gustos the Silent Wind had been fielded by the sheriff’s office as test cases of the bounty system. Apparently they’d adopted this bounty system from the Out-trade Caravansary, a trading guild of sorts that used to operate out of Dhaltown, and run bounties on dangerous highwaymen before things went to shit around here. Unfortunately the caravansary’s records were lost in the fire (set by an angry mob, etc. — we played Great Dalmuti to establish this stuff in January), so the sheriff’s office is now a bit slow about re-investigating and setting bounties for the various criminals who the caravansary was managing back then. (A secret adventure hook here, sooner or later I’ll get the PCs to investigate that ruined caravansary just outside the town.)

The players soon focused their attentions at Kill-Yah, who seemed to be a fairly easy case to them: the daughter of a local noble, she’s apparently some kind of strong female firebrand type who escaped home to live with her cultist friends instead of getting married. The reward was weighty, clocking in at 1.5k GP for capturing her alive, or half that for her dead; apparently the family had gone halfsies with the government on the reward money? Anyway, an easy case as long as we could locate her.

The party also learned that the Sunset Riders, a competing group of bounty hunters, had recently arrived in town and were chomping at the reins to start investigating cases and raking in the easy money. Four distinctly protagonist-like men who could, in the wrong situation, end up enemies of the PCs.

The actual investigation was handled on a day-by-day basis, with a variety of actions the bounty hunter adventurers could take to figure out where Kill-Yah might be hiding. I gave the players some basic suggestions for actions to take, and in true rpg fashion, they could of course invent their own.

One of the PCs was themself a veteran of Kronk’s Commandoes, one of the major gangs of Dhalmond, so he opted to take a couple of days and travel to Kronk’s new headquarters at the Temple of the Iron God to ask around about Kill-Yah from his pals. Another had some traction at the palace, where it was assumed some former acquaintances of the fancy “princess” could be found, so that’s where he’d be snooping. The third opted to start combing the plentiful refugee camp shantytown that’s gathered around Dhaltown as the Troubles have developed over the last few years.

Resolving these one by one, we did discover a bunch of more or less useful information about Kill-Yah. I had by this point rolled the dice myself to figure out her timeline, what she actually was doing right now (and what she’d been doing last month), so I could figure out who would know what, and drop information on the PCs appropriately. The flower princess’s old friends at court could tell quite a bit about her personality and values, and even hint the bounty hunters at a possible hideout (an old friend’s summer cottage, basically). We found out that Kill-Yah was now going about with a bunch of men, her 11 “apostles”, and some old caravansary magistrate who may or may not be a “lizard man” (fairly fantastical notion, might be a turn of phrase).

The shantytown investigations, in turn, amusingly didn’t reveal anything new about Kill-Yah, but instead discovered something about that other bountied outlaw, Gustos: apparently he’d stolen something from the palace to the embarrassment of the queen last month, whence the bounty. Just a bit of white noise, not meaningful as long as we’re focused on finding Kill-Yah.

In general my theory of how the investigation phase of the bounty hunting adventure is managed involves a fair bit organic arbitrariness: a given outlaw may be easier or harder to find depending on the exact particulars of what’s going on. The dicing odds are such that sometimes the bounty hunters might have to spend weeks looking for someone, or just outright conclude that they’re not realistic to find at all. Gustos there might be such a customer, one of the things the adventurers found out about him is that whoever he is and whatever he is plotting, he runs a tight operation and apparently doesn’t brag about his stuff the way Kill-Yah does. Much less information on him flying around in the rumour mill.

Kill-Yah, though, was living with the Rapala Bandits last month. Apparently looking to join them to “fight the man” as it were. Apparently that didn’t work out, so now she’s somewhere else… it was quite amusing how she just randomly had decided to seek sanctuary with Captain Kronk’s Commandos, the very same bandit gang that one of the PCs was a member of!

So this brought the player into a tricky position: he found Kill-Yah immediately at the Temple of the Iron God, as soon as he arrived, with her and her followers supping there peacefully with the commandos. Might get tricky if she realized that our man, who obviously has non-existent poker face, was there to capture her.

Things were even further complicated when we found that the PC was absolutely loyal to captain Kronk: he told the good captain about the bounty, and asked for instructions on how to proceed, to the dismay of the other PCs. This is a true PvP table, no hesitation at all when the players decide to follow their hearts! COs before bros!

So the situation shaped out into a delightful anti-climax over the next few days: the rest of the party continued their investigations at Dhaltown, spied on the Sunset Riders (they had apparently decided to look for Kill-Yah, too), and waited for their ally to return from the Temple to touch base. The players knew what the various investigation branches had discovered (just easier to run a team investigation game that way), but they couldn’t act on the information before it came to the characters, so the PCs couldn’t go to the Temple. And that one PC wasn’t in any hurry to return with the news, or try to apprehend Kill-Yah himself.

Finally the rest of the party caught the news that Kill-Yah the Princess of Flowers (a fairly visible figure, her!) was at the Temple of the Iron God. The Sunset Riders heard as well, of course, so there was a bit of a chase over who would get there first. Sunset Riders on their cowboy horses, the PCs with a wagon… well, fortunately we knew already that captain Krank had decided to interfere in the matter himself in the meantime, so it was all to be for nothing.

Captain Krank used to be a respectable soldier in the Dhalmuti’s forces, but when the old Dhalmuti died in the war some years back, Krank had the misfortune of backing the wrong pretender to the throne. With the fortunes of Sir’Aho Rangala fell Krank’s position as well, so he and his loyal men became a warlord gang of sorts. Not quite bandits, at least according to them… more like resisters against the nefarious gynocracy of queen Galamatha. Respectable enough that she hasn’t yet put a bounty on Krank’s Commandos, at least, presumably because it would upset the conservatives.

So from Krank’s viewpoint the issue with this Kill-Yah was that while she was a dangerous radical terrorist (crazy as a cuckoo, if the tales of her murdering people to ease overpopulation in a country wracked with famine are at all true), returning her to Dhaltown for the bounty would imply accepting the queen’s authority over Dhalmond; he would be requesting the queen’s contracted bounty, after all. Krank is currently embedded as the Temple Champion (a kind of temple military commander) of the resurging Iron God cult, and has actually come to fervently believe in the cause, but he still doesn’t want to just submit to the queen.

Krank’s solution to the situation was ultimately to short-circuit the queen entirely and bring Kill-Yah directly back to her parents, who’d been half of the thrust to have her bountied anyway (so as to save her life, perhaps); the parents would reward him handsomely, the father is an important influencer (a brahmin legalist) in the principality, and everybody would see that Krank was actually capable of delivering on needs that the Dhaltown government wasn’t. Also, easier to get Kill-Yah to go along when Krank wants to escort her back home instead of who knows what fate in Dhaltown. (A slap to the wrist and then back home, in practice, but she doesn’t know that.)

So long story short, the bounty hunters finally come to the Temple only to hear that Krank himself has taken the case in hand and left yesterday to escort Kill-Yah home. 20 horsemen escort, too, in case anybody was entertaining ideas about ambushing them to fight for the bounty. The rest of the players were not exactly pleased with this one PC who just watched tamely as the golden girl slowly floated away, with his NPC boss going to claim the reward.

I guess what we learned here, foremost, was that you need sufficiently hungry companions in the bounty hunting business! If part of your team doesn’t actually want it… bounty hunting is a dirty and rough business, comfortable people who don’t want to go for it will just stop when the going gets difficult.

I think next time we’re going to be visiting the Temple of the 7 Stars, or that at least was the plan last time. We’ll see if the players still think so when it’s time, but that’s what I’ll prep I guess.

State of the Productive Facilities

As I mentioned at the top, my productivity this week was messed by my being a wimp; apparently doing a couple of hours of food delivery and cleavery and cleanery and other restaurant maintenance stuff each day was enough to cause my writing efforts to grind to a halt.

Although, the campaign development work on the Discord server kept vigorously going, so maybe that also has something to do with it. I need to spend less time there and more time working on Muster.

Well, it’ll get done. Just gotta work with my disappointing productive capabilities.