Death by Bureaucracy

Saturday’s session was a city adventure. I’m growing really fond of them. Here are some bullet points.

• Miles and Poco opened up a sandwich shop in the Temple District of Veztm called Sandwich Shrine.
• They battled one of Barnabold’s lieutenants in an abandoned building and nearly managed to beat him before he escaped. He got away with 1 HP.
• Poco, immediately after the previously mentioned battle, was challenged by a bottom-feeding duelist and managed to strangle the guy with a garrote while still bleeding out from his earlier wounds.
• Made enemies of some local monks.
• Escaped from corrupt privatized police-men by causing a massive explosion.
• Poco was brought down to 0 Willpower while setting up a bank account, ending up temporarily brain-dead due to bureaucracy.
• The party established a network of messenger pigeons.

I’ve never had a campaign go on for more than 2 or 3 sessions so this is pretty wild for me. I got the idea of starting a business into their heads, and they became weirdly invested in the shop. At least Sophia did. At one point I thought I had lost her attention completely until she revealed she was making a sandwich menu. This also has the added benefit of servers being able to pick up rumors from customers, which will let me dangle a lot of hooks at once.

Despite so much happening, I don’t have a lot to say. I’m just having a lot of fun.  

Merchant Prince Desideratus

Raganhar the Padling

Art by Me

Name: Raganhar the Padling
STR 12 DEX 16 WIL 9 HP 11
Items: Ancient Sword (d8), Archaic Armor (Armor 1), Tattered Cape, Lots of Scars

Raganhar is old. Really old. In fact, his full name contains so many titles and honorifics that he's forgotten most of them. He can tell you stories about a time before Bastion, but you probably wouldn't understand him because he uses weird words like 'dost' and 'thou'. If you really press him, he might tell you about how he was a knight in a sacred order in a kingdom far away who was turned into a frog by a witch along with his knight companions.

Due to his nature he is capable of superhuman agility, often leaping from buildings like more of a man-bat than a man-frog. He is also capable of snatching distant objects with his tongue.

You will find Raganhar on the fringes of civilization, hunting massive beasts and protecting lost travelers.

Junot

Art by me via MS Paint

Name: Junot
STR 8 DEX 11 WIL 16 HP 4
Items: Pistol (d6), Knife (d6), Shovel, Crowbar

Some people do bad things for money, so maybe they can afford not to have to do bad things anymore. Junot, on the other hand, robs grave because he wants to finance bigger and better grave robberies. It's a sport for him, like boxing or chess.

He is a smooth talker who always has a lie queued up, and is especially adept at appearing innocent in scenarios where he's very obviously the villain.

You will find him in graveyards at night, or deep in tombs. Despite Junot's shady characteristics, he will not betray or otherwise try to screw over anyone who helps him out. Though, most of the time you won't even realize you're what you're helping him do. Sometimes grave-robbing is a team sport.

How to Survive on Giant Spine Island

I. Adventure Update

While on the Inert Emir, Miles and Poco choose not to side with either the Candle-Wizard First Mate Yijun or the Pirate Captain Zuzanna, and thus are forced to man a ship on their own without any knowledge of sailing. A violent storm closes in. Understanding their fate, they fire up a distress flare for the Perennial Dandy’s attention. It works, and the Dandy turns around, only to engulfed by the storm.

The party washes up on the shore of a deserted island, losing a large part of their inventory. Fortunately, the Merchant Prince Desideratus (Dez) is present, and leads them to a camp of useless sailors. The sailors won’t take any orders from somebody without a captain’s hat, but the players find one and put them to work.

II. O Captain! My Captain!

Every week the party was able to give orders to the sailors.

HUNTING

Find lots of food, but danger of being hurt.

SCAVENGING

Finding a small amount of food but virtually no danger.

EXPLORING

Find items, locations, or even food on the island.

BUILDING

Work on building the rafts so they could get off the island.

Each sailor was secretly ranked 1-5 in each category, and at the end of each week an X-in-6 roll was made to see if they succeeded at their task. Each success in building moved up progress on the rafts by a single point, and 20 were needed to get off the island. If somebody succeeded at exploring, I rolled on the following table.

Exploration Success Chart:

1. Item

2. Food

3. Lee's Hut

4. Super Capacitor

5. Item and roll again

6. Food and roll again

Lee’s Hut was the home of a martial arts master that lived on the back of a large turtle. The party brought him some accordions that he wanted, and he taught them some special techniques. The Super Capacitor is one of the expedition sites from Oddvent Oddpendium. I had another table of items, and it was even possible to find real proper treasure.

In retrospect, I really bonered up the hunting/scavenging rules and nobody got hurt. If I were to do it again, I’d have a default 1 in 6 chance of something bad happening at the camp. Then, if somebody failed at hunting there would be a chance that they were seriously injured. I would also probably have included a way for people to get better at their tasks. At the time, the only way to improve somebody’s chances was to give them an item. For example, hunters were given rifles and explorers were given whips.

They spent 3 months on the island and at least one person was bludgeoned to death with a rock.

III. The Price is Right

Without any sort of appraisal ability, I never know how the party is meant to interpret the value of whatever treasure they find. I guess this isn’t a problem specifically with ItO, since a lot of other games don’t have rules for this either.

Do I just tell them how much it’s worth? Can they make some sort of roll? At the moment, the party happens to be friends with a merchant who can give them ballpark figures. I’m wondering how other handle this sort of thing though. Any input is welcome.  

Small Update

Miles and Poco board a ship to the new world in pursuit of their rival Barnabold. A few days into the trip, a traveling merchant points out that the ship has altered course and they appear to be following a galleon known as the Perennial Dandy. The party investigate the captain’s history with this ship and don’t like what they find.

I’m not good at making dungeons yet. I have this unhealthy dependence on Silent Hill style alternate realities, and things that are weird for the sake of weird. The idea was a ship with descending decks, each getting more strange until they were basically walking around inside the throat of some sort of massive creature. In practice everything was super cramped without any real room for the players to be creative.

My original plan was for a purely social adventure where the players would try to convince the obsessed captain to stop following after an invincible galleon towards certain doom. It would have been part Moby Dick and part Master and Commander, resembling something better served for Burning Wheel. A day before the game, I realized I didn’t really have the confidence to pull it off and turned it into a dungeon.

It went okay by all (2) accounts, so whatever.

I’ve been sitting on a stupid sci-fi setting for a while now, inspired by retro anime, shmups, Phantasy Star and Mega Man. I’m thinking of writing it out as a hack of Into the Odd. I’m super into spaceship combat ala Last Starfighter, so I feel tempted to focus a lot on that but I feel like any really complex rules run counter to what makes ItO so enjoyable to me. It’s something for me to think about, anyway.

Pending title: Space Battleship Bastion.

Sit with Mussold

I think I’m pretty good at NPCs. I worked in retail for the largest part of my adult life, and have had conversations with hundreds of people. I do voices. I do quirks. Yet the Oddest thing happened while running my second game of Into the Odd, which I wish I could say I wasn’t prepared to handle.

We use Rolz to play, and at some point I discovered the command to generate an NPC. After a long hex crawl (which I honestly kind of fucked up), the players ended up in Hopesend which put me back into my comfort zone. They had a lot of questions and love talking to random people on the streets, so it was only inevitable that they would come upon Mussold Schawnpfalz.

Name: Mussold Schwanpfalz, Occupation: Shipwright, Traits: strong, healer, Psychology: fetishizes sitting down, Age: 69, Hair: shaved red, Eyes: blue, Social Ties: sister (healer, openly despised by Mussold), spouse (enduring, openly despised by Mussold), History: became chronically ill at 18, had a minor accident at 20, witnessed a murder at 26, got away with a major crime at 35, was exiled at 62

I hate it when people drop random philosophy quotes, but I feel the following statement from Sir Anthony Ray (often incorrectly attributed to Abraham Lincoln) is relevant here.

“I like big butts and I cannot lie.”

Mussold loves to invite people to sit around him and accidentally sounds like the worst impression of Tim Curry you can imagine. I can only assume the reason he despises his spouse is that she prefers standing. I wonder what major crime he got away with. Pretending to be a chair? He asks the party to sit down while they speak, and Miles shuffles around uncomfortably.

Miles: I think I’ll stand.

Mussold: Groans

Poco: I sit down.

Mussold: Moans

I decide to give Mussold the honor of relaying the status of the party’s rival and betrayer Barnabold. Barnabold sat with him, along with his 3 companions, not too long ago. The party grill him for information on Barnabolds new band, however he is only able to recall the general shapes of their asses. Blood runs from his nose.

Will we be seeing more of Mussold? The party are hitting the high seas to chase Barnabold into the new world, but if they ever come back who knows? Mussold may be waiting around, sitting pretty.