New on Desk #113 — Sven Drowned

The ol’ Coup on Monday was exciting enough that it’s the day’s top topic.

Clearing up the AP report pile

Before I tell you about Monday’s game, I better finish layout out the scene; I’ve been running a few weeks behind with these game reports all year due to my January hiatus, but now it’s time to run the future down so as to be in position to understand the present. Tuomas’s able session summaries will help me here, which sure is convenient in terms of my laziness-to-blogging ratio.

AP report pile: Coup de Main #74

We had carefully planned our approach for this session in advance, between the sessions: the party would split in twain with the stronger part remaining at the cult compound to maintain a siege, while a courier expedition would return to the town of Illmire to muster a hopefully sizeable contingent of townspeople to participate in burying the dungeon with good ol’fashioned picks and shovels. (What can I say, not my preferred strategic approach.)

This was a damn harrowing strategic position to be in! We had three unskilled ‘lings, one 1st level bard and a 3rd level hermit. The enemy had a presumed-lone-wolf crossbow assassin with poisoned bolts and clearly professional attitude. We were in the middle of wilderness, like 20 miles away from the town.

And no way that first shot was luck, it was carefully placed and obviously the assassin would manage to get that shot in without too much difficulty. We didn’t have nearly the number of people to run effective screening on our journey, so anybody observing our movements from the woods would have been able to follow at convenience and choose their moment to pepper us.

Knowing that quick thinking is paramount in a crisis situation (I dislike it myself when players hem and haw when their characters are in trouble), I had the team dive for the nearest undergrowth to get out of sight of the assassin, who might at that moment be reloading for a second shot. That should get us a few tense minutes to figure out a plan.

What would you do in this situation? It’s basically exactly like Predator, the movie of jungle survival. I felt like this was a great bit of gaming, quite fun when I first realized how utterly fucked we were, and then honed in on… well, not exactly a perfect plan, but at least some kind of plan. We’d just have to try it to find out how it’d work.

My take-away from the strategic situation was that the one thing we absolutely could not do would be some variation of “hurry up and outrun the assassin”. We had nowhere to run and no reason to think that the assassin wouldn’t be able to keep pace. Going wandering in the woods to find the assassin and accost them would similarly be obviously doomed to failure. The only option was to try to set up a counterstroke, and that meant using the rest of the party as a bait while Kermit the Hermit, our only party member with applicable skills, would try to turn the situation around and ambush the ambusher.

We had the initial information advantage on the assassin in that they saw us go for the bush, but they also saw Kermit being hit by that bolt, so when the rest of the party hurried away without Kermit, it would be natural to assume that he’d succumbed to the poison. If the assassin had checked the bush it’d have been 1-vs-1, but as it was, the assassin followed us, and thus the hunt was on.

Kermit is a Forester by character class, sort of like a Ranger without the martial skills. This made him well fit for keeping pace, picking his route and spotting the assassin without being spotted himself in turn. On the other hand, no martial edge. My basic theory, as I colorfully expressed it during the session, was that Kermit would locate that damn assassin and then throttle them in the swamp, mainly on the strength of his hit point superiority.

This all worked out surprisingly well, Kermit got some great dice rolls. Totally set up to surprise the assassin just as they were focused on preparing their next shot against our party. The ambush check itself failed, but no big deal; he’d snuck up to melee range. It was quite the grim surprise to find out that this damn assassin was literally an Assassin, and 5th level! We were so, so fucked here. Instead of a 3rd level +0 attack bonus against non-leveled +2 attack bonus (a reasonable assumption), we had a big-ass protagonist-tier assassin hero fighting the man whose claim to fame is that he talks to mushrooms. The assassin had a +4 rank martial art and the whole damn ninja panoply; explicitly trained by the Greyhawk Guild of Assassins by all account. Like a female version of that Assassin’s Creed fellow.

I still think that the plan was good in the sense that it was the best odds we had in a bad situation; by all rights that assassin should have wiped us no problem. Just, sometimes the dice are on your side, and here we’d set Kermit up with the best possible chances he could have. Knowing there was no life in retreat, Kermit just went for it and had far better dicing luck than we had any right to expect. Catching the assassin in the gut with the spear, he managed to shave out a sufficient hit point advantage early on. Kermit wearing chain mail while the assassin was much lighter was fairly decisive here, too. (Were I GMing, the chain mail would have incurred a minor penalty on the initial maneuvers part; Kermit rolled so well on that, though, that it wouldn’t have affected the outcome.)

Kermit was the true MVP of the session here: after winning an impossible Predator wilderness commando matchup the man traipsed into town and claimed this holy mace that we’d left behind before. Apparently it burns everybody who’s not a 2nd level Cleric of Pelor, which Pelor solved by initiating Kermit on the spot. So now his character class is what, Savage Forester Cleric. A convoluted multiclass situation that we’ve been trying to untangle to make it work for him. (Clerics can be surprisingly useless without any training, we’ve found.)

AP report pile: Coup de Main #75

Third week of February, we continued from where we last left off:

I had been convinced ever since we found out about that Fear aura at the cult compound that the mace would be the key to actually getting inside that dungeon. The mace was so obviously set up, framed at the Illmire temple as this powerful magic item so inimical to the Evil cult that even as they controlled the temple before our arrival, they couldn’t touch the mace, not so much as to move it. And here we have the god of solar purification set up against “Fearmother” and her aura of fear. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the mace is a “quest item”, an item intended to unlock an obstacle.

Of course this only applies to adventures written by little pussies. Somebody with the wargaming spirit would be vastly more nihilistic, understanding that it is in fact possible for two things to exist in the scenario without them being integrally related in purpose. How fortunate for me that such nihilists are as rare as hen’s teeth, so mace-based dungeon raid it is!

Rangers (and Foresters) have this handy 3rd level class feature that allows the player, when leading an expedition in the wilderness, to choose between two random encounter options if a random encounter occurs. Thought it up myself, and I’m happy to report that it is just about as fun and useful as I expected it to be! Couldn’t have shuttled between the cult compound and town without Kermit, and I’m not just talking about his miraculous fisticuffs with that 5th level Assassin last session.

So yeah, fuck me and my teleological preconceptions about how other people write adventure modules. Seriously, good for the author for dodging the obvious hacken-eyed quest item routine here. I guess a real solution to the Fear issue does not actually exist in the adventure at all. I guess we could have just missed it on account of beelining to the cult’s headquarters with extreme aggression, evidently missing the entire cursus honorum that the adventure assumes adventurers to take to level up for the final fight.

An amusing mechanical interaction here: our 5th level Thief Rob had been planning our operations here using this cool class feature, Heist Planning, that allows him to provide various mechanical advantages to meticulously preplanned operations. So Rob had planned our dungeon assault here, and for some damn reason he’d attached the action mode (another Thief class feature in Coup) Unknowable Intentions to the initial maneuvers phase of the assault plan. I couldn’t understand what that was supposed to do for the plan in advance, but when we failed to penetrate that fear aura and decided to retreat, the wisdom was revealed: because we had been maneuvering with the mode active, Rob managed to make our abortive assault and retreat look like we weren’t trying to invade at all. Genius! We’d preserved our strategic surprise, fairly likely, despite tap-dancing with the fear aura right in front of the dungeon.

AP report pile: Coup de Main #76

So this was a little change of pace in between our furious attempts at the Illmire business: Tuomas-the-GM had caught a flu and thus had a last minute cancellation. I stepped up to run some more Castle Greyhawk megadungeon stuff instead. While this doesn’t directly relate to the arc of action I’m laying out for this newsletter’s purposes, it’s easier for me if I just summarize this interlude session her as well instead of skipping it.

As a megadungeon the Castle works well for these kinds of random drop-in sessions. The party doesn’t necessarily have to have anything in particular they’re looking for there, the concept of delving in the hopes of fat loots works well enough. Although, with the Castle being as treasure-poor as it is, I would recommend having a heftier motivation. As we had Frida the Teenage Witch with us, and her still clinging to the hope of finding the Oracle of Zagyg (relates to our Elfquest exercises from before) somewhere in here, the party had at least a little bit of a goal.

Not knowing where the Oracle might be, though, the adventurers were forced to take a stab in the dark. The last time we played, the adventurers discovered that the mysterious fogs that had impeded descending down the grand spiral stairway had dissipated, enabling the party to encounter the memorable juggernaut trap in the dungeon depths below. This observation inspired the adventurers now to go seek the second place where they had seen the same mists before, namely the kobold nest of the Old Guard Kobolds.

The adventurers had driven the kobolds to escape into the mists several weeks ago (diegetic time; this was I think like last summer real-time), so the nest was approached with reasonable care, but aside from some signs of dungeon animals or some such, the place seemed abandoned. The three stairways (!) leading down from the kobold nest were unimpeded, and indeed devoid of the mysterious mists!

What we ended up doing involved three separate descends to find out where these staircases lead. Frida used her Touch of the Ages (psychometry) talents to figure out that two of the stairs went to the “2nd level” of the dungeon, while the middle one went to “3rd level”. Also, that the Oracle of Zagyg had not set foot here probably ever. Still too curious to not investigate.

To summarize:

The middle stair went to a porticullis with goblinoids living on the other side. So that’s out.

The left-hand stair went to a scary magically darkened room that the party wizard scouted out very, very carefully with Spider Climb. (As a typical showcase of player pattern-locking, the party was convinced that there would be a pit trap in the dark room, and for some reason their characters would be unable to avoid falling in there unless they literally crept in the ceiling. I’ve no idea what exactly they thought to find out about the room by roving around the ceiling in the dark, though.)

The right-hand stair led to a room with a giant spider that the party quickly dispatched. I thought it was lovely how the first adventurer to spot the lurking spider declared their action to be to retreat with great alacrity, leaving their co-scout (they were running two scouts for some reason right then) to take a surprise attack from the spider. Frictions of war, only possible if you actually allow players to declare actions and stand by what they blurt out. (A GM could also allow players to “correct themselves” after everybody else tells them that they’re being a moron by not warning others about such a spider. But if you did that, then where’s the skill element in playing the game…)

This third route seemed promising to the players in their zany little player minds (GMing after a while again is making me feel megalomaniacal), so a bit of further exploration occurred. The party ran into a damn dangerous troglodyte trap soon enough. I mean, check this out:

1 trog chief, 3 HD
5 trog warriors, 2 HD each

Troglodytes (they’re a kind of lizard man in D&D) are unusually dangerous for evil humanoids despite their stone age tech level due to their in-born potent monster traits. I like to run trogs with a bit of uncertainty as to what these exactly are (my default is two traits per trog tribe, but they’re not necessarily always the same ones), but the default write-up equips them with chameleon invisibility and a combat musk (a disgusting stench that weakens foes), which is what we were dealing with here.

What made the situation exceptionally dangerous was that the party were tactically thoroughly bamboozled by the trogs: there was mutual accidental spotting, after which the trogs retreated to their nest and set up to ambush the intruders. When the adventurers entered, the warriors had hidden themselves inside the nest room, blending in with the shadows and textures of the room. The chief would then enter from further in, roar and burst their stench boils, signaling for the warriors to descend on the party. It would be a slaughter.

Or I guess not, if the GM consistently fails just about every roll. The trog primary ambush (the chief barging in) failed to surprise, and the party proceeded to beat up the powerful chief, killing him in one combat round. The next round the trog warriors entered the fray, gaining another ambush check, only to fail as well. At that point the situation dissolved into a chaotic melee that could have still ended up in a loss (the party had like half a dozen HD vs 10 on the trog side, and the trogs were all warriors), but if I can’t roll hits then I can’t roll hits. Saad Man (2nd level Lawful Evil Fighter, sort of fantasy-Persian in flavour) particularly acquitted himself well, forcing two of the trog warriors into a corner with his shield, refusing to let them out and patiently fencing them to death despite their spears and maces.

So yeah, pretty much a flawless victory out of what seemed like it could become a total party kill easily enough. I guess these are the situations that are easy to forget later because they didn’t end up in complete existential failure. From the GM side of the table it sure seemed dangerous, though.

There were some trog non-combatants that the party ultimately spared, some treasure (the trogs had been collecting silver coinage in a chest apparently for some reason?), and perhaps the most importantly, after the fight Saad Man harmonized with his magic shield! This was a risky play relating to the magic item management subgame on the player’s part (I don’t think he cared that much about the shield, so could swing for the fences on that one), but it paid off massively here. We learned a great deal about that magic shield, and about Saad Man here. Nothing is certain in this game of death and dice, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if this would prove to be a watershed moment for Saad Man, the moment where he transitions from a low-tier generic dungeon adventurer into a Protagonist.

I won’t discuss the shield’s particulars here quite yet. The implications are evolving, and we’re running a “funny” sketch where the shield’s wondrous powers are so ominous that they’re secret. It’s a +1 rank magic item, so let’s just say that it’s very flavourful but not necessarily extremely potent. Yet. It is now called the Green Devil Shield for all that it seems to be a shield of plain vert (green) in heraldic terms.

Monday: Coup de Main #77

So anyway, coming back to our core story here: the Knights Temp had been besieging the cult compound for what feels like a month (and is a month, so that checks out), and had been consistently failing to pull together an effective raid on the place. At first this was because the strategic consensus favoured a siege, but as we discovered more about the reach of the Fearmother’s fell influence (she was basically gnawing at the minds of the adventurers night by night as we kept hanging around near the dungeon), the council of adventurers tipped over to favour a raid.

Unfortunately, we lacked the means to penetrate the powerful Fear aura straight up; last time we’d learned that the tool I’d had my hopes on, the holy mace of Pelor, only granted a save bonus to its wielder in this regard. I’m pretty sure that we could hack a Cleric + mace divine magic combo to cause the mace to shine an anti-fear aura, but for that we’d need an actually skilled Cleric, and all we had here were an untrained 3rd level Cleric and a half-trained 1st level one, so kinda not ideal for experimental field work.

Lacking a complete solution, what we’d ended up putting together last session was a kind of combined arms strategy where all the party members contributed their best fear-opposing magics to the party fund. We’d layer these together and hope that they’d be enough to punch through the fear aura. Like so:
The Bard would use Bardic Music to bolster the team. Bardic Music is the core class feature of the character class; it’s not very powerful, but it’s surprisingly widely useful, often capable of influencing various situations.
Ælfstan would use Calming Wave, one of his psionic talents, to bolster his own courage and that of others joining his meditation session. This application has been ruled feasible, but it takes several hours, and is most effective among friends.
Magnus Tap would serve more Blessed Beer of Wenta the harvest goddess. This is actually surprisingly bolstering against Fear, but the 1st level Cleric couldn’t produce enough for everybody all at once. (And had limited beer supply in general.)

In the last session we did this entire routine the first time and had it flub horribly, perhaps in part because the Bard failed to garner even a basic success in his part. Our super-smart plan here was to try again the next day. Let’s see how that went, in the session Tuomas dramatically named the End of Evil:

This was fairly amusing: I first rolled a critical success on the Bardic Music check and sold the GM on the concept that the Bard had stumbled on the right emotional and intellectual concepts to force the Fearmother itself to shirk back, suppressing the fear aura for a moment. It’d just last for 10 minutes though, and it happened kinda unexpectedly, so the Bard just rushed to the dungeon entrance with his new song when he realized the power he had there, so as to suppress the aura and let the party in.

So of course the team missed all this, as all the leaders were in psychotherapy with Ælfstan when it happened. By the time the camp’d been roused, the momentary opportunity had passed. Well, at least I got a strong save for everybody against the fear check from the excellent jamming session. Which then proceeded to do nothing, apparently, when our key personnel (Sven the Reaver, our main meat man) still failed to resist the fear.

Meanwhile, though, I’d rolled an inspiration check from my experience of forcing a Great Old One and its ruinous offering of fear to back off, and that was a critical success as well! I’d planned to save up the inspiration (they last for over 24 hours by default) for use inside the dungeon in case we needed to distract the Fearmother in a direct confrontation, but when the party decided to continue the raid without Sven, Stone and Ælfstone, I popped the cork on that inspiration and did a repeat performance of the Bardic Music to suppress the fear long enough to get the rest of the team inside.

Pretty good for a 1st level Bard!

Let’s talk dungeon tactical doctrine here, because what we see here is something that is simultaneously extremely traditional, yet also fairly unlikely to happen in any given official version of D&D combat rules.

The basic tactical issue that both sides are attempting to solve is the question of wizard initiative: a wizard will generally win any remotely level-appropriate encounter if they get to cast at all. Come mid-levels (and damn did we find ourselves in a mid-tier D&D adventure all of a sudden) that’s the basic question of dungeon combat to my mind: the enemy has some kind of burst artillery (if not a wizard, then some damn dragon breath), you do too, and the side that gets a targeting solution (clear shot) and gets a shot off first wins. If you don’t, you haven’t learned and prepped the right spells.

So this is what used to be the basic mid-tier (and unfortunately, high tier) tactical question in D&D: how can I get my fighter to throttle that wizard before they cast? If we can do that, we can win. If we can’t, we lose. And, from the opposite direction: how can I keep that wizard safe until they cast?

Here in our practical situation we had a chest-high barricade and mook spearmen protecting the spellcasters, who’d also split into two corridors, both with some visibility of their planned killing space. Good planning, any mundane assault would surely be slowed down sufficiently.

Our team didn’t have wizards in this sense, but we did have some roughly correct-tier muscle wizards, which we found out was actually entirely sufficient for solving the tactical issue: what the enemy had would perhaps slow down combatants who can’t just leap over the barricade and kill everybody in five seconds, then continuing to charge at the real threat, the wizards.

In almost any other edition of D&D this wouldn’t quite have worked this way, at least not with these exact ingredients. Spellcasting in Coup is just a tad slow unless you prepare the spell on hair-trigger in advance. In a modern D&D edition (where spells aren’t as powerful, admittedly) all this wouldn’t even be a question, of course the wizards get a spell off before the enemies maneuver through an entire battlefield.

Likewise, the fighter contingent would find that leap+flurry maneuver difficult to perform in most editions of the game; in older editions for lack of ruling framework for determining if it’s possible, in modern ones because enemies that go down just like that don’t really exist (except in 4e, where you’d die to action economy issues). So we were pleasantly empowered by knowledge and competent use of the rules, too.

All told, we’d matched wits with the cult compound for several sessions by now; this was the moment of truth, they had several days to set up their defense and we had the initiative on when to attack. And when it came to the question of wizard casting, our team managed to shut them down before they got their bolts off!

So… yeah. About us winning that wizard encounter handily… thing is, these weren’t just a 5th level wizard and his sister the 7th level wizard — they were some damn empowered cult champion monstrosities with, well, monster HD on top of their wizardry. +7 to hit, and the bigger one had this absolutely ridiculous weapon that ignored armor, did 2d6 damage and caused cursed wounds that could not be healed.

That Invisible Stalker was fairly challenging as it was, but Sven actually went down hard against that cursed dagger.

I thought that the way we played this stuff out was fairly nice: with both a video and text chat, it was possible for the Bard and Magnus Tap to work furiously to save Sven while the others wrapped out the combat encounter. We have some fairly nice first aid and general injury rules that worked out really well here; I loved playing a medic, it wasn’t any less boring and simple than combat would have been.

Because Sven is damn valuable to the team (he’s the current XP score champion of the campaign!) we didn’t exactly half-ass the procedure, and tried out some very esoteric methods of saving him. The last one was the wackiest, but I’m convinced that it was basically legitimate. I call it the Tinkerbell Gambit:

Sven was ~1k XP away from leveling to 5th level. While the level itself wouldn’t do anything for him (gaining more HP when you’re already bleeding to death doesn’t stop the bleeding, which was the physiological problem here), the Barbarian happens to gain a new class feature, Spirit Flare, at said level. Spirit Flare is quite potent and would basically guarantee Sven’s survival if we could get it to trigger “in advance”.

So as some clever soul (I think it was Heikki?) remarked, if we could somehow contribute all the XP that was just gained from this combat encounter to Sven, that would suffice for the level-up. This is, of course, impossible by the rules; combat XP gets distributed evenly between everybody participating in the combat. This is where the Tinkerbelling comes in: I realized that bardic magic totally can perform certain dramatic manipulations on that level of reality. I had just a 1st level Bard, but Bardic Music isn’t primarily level-dependent, so maybe I could pull it off?

So the Bard set aside our stupid 0-chance plan (it involved a blessed potion of healing applied directly to the agravated bleed — already judged to have flat 0% chance of working due to the cursed blade) and instead led the party in re-enacting that scene from Peter Pan where Tinkerbell’s life is saved by the kids in the audience wishing really hard for her to survive. I’m sure my reputation is in tatters with the party after that, especially as it didn’t work.

Or rather, I did my part, succeeded in yet another Bardic Music check and Sven did get the XP and did level up… it was just ruled that with Sven flatlining right that minute, the Spirit Flare would only have a 50% chance to trigger before Sven’s spirit would lose grip of the dying body. (I developed that ruling. It was me.) So of course that last roll wasn’t in favour.

I’d like to correct you here Tuomas — Sven was Evil, not evil. Remember how I always pepper my talks about Alignment with the standard disclosure about the Moral Alignment being an in-game conceit with clearly gameable definitions, not a serious attempt at defining what “good” and “evil” mean in the real world? Well, Sven’s a great example here, because he absolutely was determined to be Evil by the rules, but that was all metaphysical magic effect bullshit: he was Evil because he insisted on wearing gear that came from Hell (and not the Great Wheel one either) and on eating the hearts of potent Evil monsters to empower himself. In mundane moral terms Sven was a gritty anti-hero who only ever shat down the throats of his enemies in berserk rage. Admittedly one who was quickly going to hell in a handbasket, but I guess now we’ll never find out for sure what would have happened.

A bit of eulogy is appropriate here, I should think

The Coup campaign has been going for over a hundred sessions by now, counting both campaign forks. We started in the summer of 2020, and here’s the story of how we began:

Various influences had been poking me to start a new campaign: desire to write a D&D book (soon to be finished, I hope), interest in bringing together the old crew in the online medium, our face to face gaming having stopped due to Covid… even my reading Greyhawk books was pushing that way. But what triggered the decision to get up and start the game was when Peitsa suggested that he’d be interested in playing, and Heikki suggested that he could play Sven Thorsson, his memorable 3rd level barbarian character who’d gotten lost in the Underworld in Heikki’s fantasy Europe campaign arc sometime in I want to say 2015 or so.

Sven was from “fantasy Europe”, our joint historical campaign setting that’s been going in various campaigns over the last decade. He’s a medieval Swedish adventurer type who’d seen some shit before ever becoming an adventurer. His first levels were gained in Heikki’s grim and gritty medieval Moldova. Last we saw of Sven back then was when, in the dungeons of Stonehell, the party encountered some kind of weird Grim Reaper floating boat and fought it, with Sven bravely jumping into the boat just before it retreat back to the hells it came from. I was there myself, I happened to play in this leg of Heikki’s campaign too.

We later found out that Sven had survived the trip to the underworld alive, and as befits Charon’s task, the reaper had deposited him in Valhalla (viking adventurer, remember)… which in Heikki’s game was this delightfully shabby, rundown Potemkin village setup renting space in Hell. It was great when Sven (and some dead viking buddies we created for company on the adventure) managed to break out of the Valhallan aquarium world to realize that we were not only in Hell, but also hopelessly lost in its underpinnings.

(The Finnish eponym for Heikki’s Valhalla interpretation is “Halvalla”, in case it needs to be differentiated from other takes on the concept. This is a hilarious pun in the context, hallmark of Heikki’s brand of dry comedy.)

But that was all back then. Here in Coup, the idea of bringing Sven in became the creative cornerstone, the veritable campaign premise of the new endeavour: the first moving event in the campaign, what I started the first session with, was a description of how Sven Thorsson, having wandered the Underworld for veritable objective years, what felt like subjective centuries, had slowly made his way towards the metaphorical up direction, until slowly he emerged from the Castle Greyhawk dungeons, exploring his way up into this whole new, alien world of Oerth. In the action-packed campaign-starter cutscene Sven encountered the Old Guard Kobolds and other perils of the Castle, finally working his way up to the battlements and diving desperately into the river to avoid all the monsters. Unknown to the man, his act here finally stretched the spells safeguarding the Castle to the breaking point, releasing Castle Greyhawk once again to the world.

The next day, downriver from the Castle, at the town of Yggsburg, young ne’er-do-well Rob Banks and his gangster friends fished Sven out of the river. The gang used to live in the swamped mud-flats of the town back then, right next to the river. This chance encounter with Sven, a stranger who hardly knew the language yet was a solid 3rd level adventurer, sparked Rob himself to decide to become an adventurer. As he gathered his first motley crew (ironically not involving Sven; Peitsa couldn’t actually make it to the first couple sessions of the campaign), Rob traded ruthlessly on the mystery and fame of the strange, vigorous man who didn’t even speak the local language yet.

So really, insofar as Coup taken as a whole has a protagonist, it’s Sven Thorsson, the reaver of many worlds. He’s a direct connection between our long-running fantasy Europe campaign and this new project.

Sven did join Rob’s new adventuring affair later on, and made some gains as a trusty frontline anchorman, as you’d expect of a character of significant level. Peitsa took a lengthy hiatus from the campaign after the first arc for his military service, so we didn’t see Sven for some time, but in the summer of ’21 he was again back, and participating regularly. A couple of other successful characters had gotten their starter levels by then, and a few other planar travelers from past campaigns had followed Sven’s provocative example of just boldly thrusting their way into the game, so by this time we had the beginnings of a fairly respectable mid-tier party. Sven, Rob, Phun, Ælfstan, Artemur… you know, the regulars.

We learned to know Sven better over the rest of the year. He’d always been a fairly gritty character, even back in fantasy Europe; a viking reaver with mercenary experience from Constantinople, solidly medieval. His time in Hell had made Sven even grimmer, though; not in a cartoony evil-laugh sense, but rather in terms of determination… the man was terribly self-centered, ever-confident and utterly, entirely unafraid of death. Peitsa himself plays hard in advocating for his characters, a GM won’t get any rope when he’s standing watch, but Sven couldn’t care less; he’d lost all his fucks back in Hell, it seemed like.

For instance: soon after starting his new life in Flanaess, Sven apparently decided that it was on him to test the mettle of the entire Monster Manual. Just, fight his way through the fantasy ecology of this ridiculous elf-pants world. Gotta defeat ’em all. Got a special personal quest for doing that, in fact, rewarding him whenever he fought and defeated a new type of monster. Made Sven a favourite to adventure with, as half the quest XP gets bestowed on the rest of the party.

And, it didn’t take long for Sven to start eating the hearts and spleens of his kills. Just on the principle of being a roguelike badass, he’d grow more powerful by doing that. Peitsa established this ambition for Sven before I’d actually created a physical cultivation rules framework to quantify whether that sort of thing could possibly do anything except get Sven killed. This isn’t a nice campaign, you don’t somehow just get to declare that your unique snowflake character eats poisonous things and gains poison immunity and acid spit from that, no matter how roguelike your character feels themself. But Sven didn’t care; he wasn’t a man of many words or grand speeches, he was just somebody whose spirit had been compressed by what Hell had to give… and he’d ran out of fucks to give.

Speaking of Hell, Sven came out of there with some… baggage. (Result of his last adventure before Heikki’s campaign went on its still on-going hiatus.) I don’t mind the cursed axe that caused Sven to have uncontrollable episodes of a Black Rage so much, as at least Sven knows about that and avoids using the axe unless desperate. No, the real concern is the Iron Crown: we’d suspected for a long time that it’s subtly affecting Sven’s thinking, and Peitsa insisting that Sven wears it as a fashion statement despite it seemingly doing nothing for him isn’t comforting. We established later that the Crown has in fact pulled Sven’s Alignment all the way to Evil. But what does Sven care, he’s not the slave of some arbitrary system of cosmic morality labeling. “I am what I am”, the universal motto of the barbarian hero (and God, but you knew that).

Sven was never cruel and abusive towards his friends, for all that he was absolutely ruthless against his enemies. Innocent would die if they strayed in his way when he was doing the business. But he didn’t enjoy torture, or accept any power above his own Will, divine or infernal. He would risk his own life for his band, and did so many times. I can’t in good conscience disagree with that Crown, Sven was Evil… but of the exact sort that TSR D&D culture hated, the kind that you can ultimately live with as an ally and an antihero protagonist.

Sven even managed to befriend people despite his literally alien nature. In Ælfstan the Monk he found a fellow stranger in a strange land, equally disoriented by Flanaess. (Elfstone comes from some D&D 5e world I think? Tommi plays weird with this multiverse concept.) Stone Battlecreek is a kindred spirit Sven’s party saved from Castle Greyhawk dungeons, a NPC who became a retainer and learned much from Sven. And of course Sven never forgot young Rob, whom he saw grow into a ruthless Elder Brother (Thief 5th) over the summer of 576 CY. He trusted Rob’s planning implicitly long before he actually learned to plan well, just on the strength of the fact that Rob’d saved his life by fishing him out of that river back in the campaign-starting cutscene.

We never quite got around to discovering whether Sven’s ruthless “sword training program” of using a Lawful sword in service of his barbaric self-fulfillment ideals was going to twist this ancient Aerdian Officer’s Blade into a magic sword more suited to a chaotic barbarian, or if it was merely going to become dangerously cursed and twisted by the forcible negotiations between the tool and its user. Again, Peitsa asserted Sven’s program on this before I’d actually developed the rules for resolving the question. From all signs the task was formidable, but what Sven was doing seemed to be working.

Had Sven not been taken from us so soon, he’d soon have been contesting his own spirit with that Crown, as the impending Spirit Flare would have defined much about his heroic nature. It’s sort of a watershed moment for the character class. Instead, while Sven died with the 5th level class title of Destroyer, the watershed came for the campaign as a whole: now that Sven’s gone, what will change, and what streams will the adventures follow into this new era?

Sven took ~20 000 XP to the grave with him. That incidentally makes him a prospective Resurrection target by campaign rules, but I don’t think anybody really wants the scary antihero alien back, plus we’re too timid to actually try to resurrect anybody for reals I think, for all that it’s a thing in the campaign setting. More importantly, that’s like 20% of the entire XP flow of the campaign so far; we’ve been decimated by this loss! Fortunately Peitsa had a strong retainer (the 3rd level Stone Battlecreek) ready to step in, so he’s not starting again from quite the bottom, but it cannot be denied that the campaign as a whole took a major step back with this loss. If we are to ever get to Name Level (my totally-jocular-not-at-all-obsessive campaign goal), this is the scale of setback that cannot become a habit.

State of the Productive Facilities

Well, this is again a ~8k word newsletter, so you can guess what I’ve been doing this week. I would have split this into two parts, too, except there’s no good place to split at, really. It’s all one tale.