SANDBOX EMPIRE

 This is pretty accurate...


CATEGORY
Adventure

WHAT
The always provocative and endearingly arcane Patrick Stuart at False Machine published, not so long ago, the adventure Deep Carbon Observatory. It's one of those products of which first I purchased the PDF and then had no choice but to also buy the hard copy.

PLAYERS
Two.

SYSTEM
T.W.E.R.P.S.

WHEN
2-3 months ago?

TONE
Thundarr the Barbarian + William S. Burroughs  

CHARACTERS 

• Zanuvrion Zal, Alien Scientist: Cephalopod encased in chitinous armor possessed of an inexhaustible curiousity. Exerts a low-grade mental suggestion at all times, convincing others he looks much like everyone else. This becomes problematic in stressful situations...
• Lu Cheng, Monk of the Order of the Pernicious Wind: Human martial artist able to manipulate the wind to his advantage. When this fails, he of course uses nunchucks...
• Dusty & JOE-BOT: Human entrepreneur and creator of the JOE-BOT mech-suit, built from the extensive ruins of a once-splendid coffee shop. Functions as either a refreshment stand or hurler of stale scones and boiling coffee, as needed...
• Quercus McCringleberry, Necromantic Druid: Human druid focused not on growth but decay. He also carries lotus powders...
• Rupert Grue, Seeker after Things Best Left Unsought: Human antiquarian equipped with a voluminous Encyclopedia and utter familiarity with the Abyss. He also carries lotus powders...
• The Whisperer in Darkness (TWiD), Master of the Shadow Arts: Human ninja who gets the job done, even when his companions forget he's there. He also carries lotus powders...

SUMMARY
...in which our eclectic band contributes to civic stability, helps a Bishop find his church, feeds the forlorn, mixes it up with a platypus, puts the dead to rest, and has words with a very large squid.

QUOTES

"Mind the toads..."

"As a cephalopod, I'll try to mind-control it."

HIGHLIGHTS

• When a group of rogue adventurers is discovered attempting to take advantage of the chaos to wrest control of the flooded town of Carrowmere from the rightful mayor, the coup is thwarted by a combination of martial arts, magic, and rabble-rousing.
• Refugees are provided with ample scones and coffee while squatting on their rooftops.
• A promise is made to an old man to deliver his wife's corpse to her ancestral tomb, located farther up the flooded valley.
• Children whisper about a witch.
• A fugitive bishop is delivered to his detached church, providing boons from the Optical God. Also there are large frogs eating corpses until they burst.
• Our adventurers have an inconclusive tussle with a giant platypus.
• A body is safely delivered, and an ominous warning discovered.
• Our adventures have a conclusive tussle with a giant squid, mostly freezing and boiling it.
• A windmill is discovered, besieged by bone-pale crabs.

THOUGHTS

• There's a LOT going on at the beginning of this adventure. The causal flowchart helps, but I think it probably has too many arrows...
• I love the fact that decisions made under pressure, right at the beginning, can have far-reaching repercussions.
• T.W.E.R.P.S. worked just fine as a system for this. I spent maybe a half-hour going through the text and converting stats from the given LotFP.
• I REALLY wish the maps were either A) NOT drawn in scratchy pencil, or B) provided at a higher scratchy-pencil resolution online somewhere.

OTHER 

There's a group of NPCs detailed in the text, the Crows. They're the kind of hallucinatory character-studies I'd expect from the mind behind the False Machine. While I liked the idea of them, in the end, I sorta felt that if I used them as written, the adventure would end up being more about them than the trials and tribulations of the player characters. I read a comment somewhere online about DCO that suggested it was more like a new form of literature than an adventure (I may be paraphrasing badly...); I guess that's what my sense of the Crows was. Actually, in some ways they feel like a revised version of first group of player characters to slog their way up the valley...

Now again, this doesn't make them a bad addition; I do wonder, however, how many people have actually used them? Patrick, did you use them?

Step right up and rub my belly!

Everyone gathered at my house last Sunday morning, and the Traveller campaign began!

Ship: The Laughing Buddha, re-purposed heavy freighter. Re-purposed for what, you ask? Only Naval Intelligence knows and, to a lesser degree, Commander Pinback...

I don't have the deck plans handy, but they'll be added in their own post.

Crew:

• Ex- Naval Officer Commander Pinback, Ship's Owner, Captain and Pilot
• Ex-Marine Force Cmdr. Baukin Bahr, Jr., XO and Medical Officer
• Ex-Scout Rufus Jones, Navigator and Salvage Entrepeneur
• Ex-Merchant Donovan Braddock, Gunner and General Roustabout
• Ex-Barbarian(?) J'Imjohtep, Warrior, Sword-wielder, Ass-kicker, Security Chief, and Back-up Gunner
• Ex-Battlefield Armor Repair Unit RS32H, aka "Jack", Steward and Back-up Engineer
• Jyro McAllistair, NPC Engineer
• (One or two other retconned NPC Engineers, TBA)

Our Cosmic Saga opened in the Ragged Edge Sector; Subsector, Mad Dog's Defeat; Planet, Subsec Capital Silver Moon, with Rufus and companions Braddock (Donovan) and J'Imjohtep having come to an agreement with Laughing Buddha crew Cmdr. Pinback and Baukin Bahr about a potentially very lucrative salvage job in the Thunderbelt Asteroid Field.

Returning to the starport after recruiting some Engineers for the newly-recommisioned ship, they noticed the freight elevator was ajar. Scans of the ship's computers and onboard surveillance showed nothing amiss, but J'Imjohtep, Braddock, and Rufus went aboard while Cmdr. Pinback called the starport security. Braddock and Rufus went to their cabins to grab firearms (the Planetary Authority forbade all weapon-bearing) while J'Imjohtep grabbed his broadsword (really more of a bastard sword) from where he had left it in the cargo bay. As he moved in to check the Engineering sections, an unfamiliar alarm began to sound, and a bullet ricoccheted off the bulkhead from the open hatchway to his right. Ducking into cover by the catwalk ladder right next to the hatchway, he narrowly avoided getting shot a second time. He swarmed up the ladder, moved silently onto the catwalk, and got the first real glimpse of his attacker, who was standing next to what looked like an open compartment in the floor, maybe 1x2 meters large. Seeing his chance, J'Imjohtep leapt down and took off his assailant's gun arm with a single blow of his sword.

Then, things got complicated...

Coming up next: Robots, Mining Companies, and Alcohol...

                                            Player Activity Record

The topic for this post is the initial Player Activity Record, compiled from the "archives" of the first nine months of the campaign. At this point, participants are identified by player name, not character name (this changes later on.)

The first thing to notice, of course, is that 23 players are listed! This includes John and Len---since both were DMing, both also got to play. The top paragraph gives a peek at what the tone of the whole campaign will be like:

This is the first report of the D&D campaign along the Ryth, published as a public service by the Yggdrasill papermill, and compiled by John Van De Graaf from the recent archives of Rythlondar. Please report any inaccuracies to your friendly referee so that he can feed you to a ravenous purple worm, thereby cleansing his records.

I doubt anyone in the hobby at this time was taking themselves too seriously...though they were very obviously having fun!

Even though nine sessions are notated (third week in Nov. of '74 - the third week of March '75), November has no details (I'm assuming that covered expedition A), so it really starts with Session 2 (game week 3). It looks like the "campaign time scale" mentioned on the first page was decided upon: one actual week = one game week.

Some quick math yields the following tally:

• Eight expeditions over 17 weeks of real/game time
• Several weeks had two adventures going on
• Total fatalities: 21
• Highest XP total: Two characters in Expedition B received 4999 XP!
• Lowest XP total: One character in Expedition M received only 115 XP (though it looks like he collected 360 GP, so I'm not sure what happened there...)
• Highest GP total: 1462, in Expedition E
• Lowest GP total: Three characters in Expedition C walked out with only 26 GP.

Interesting here is the overall low GP totals. I'm assuming it's for total treasure gained, though I guess that could be  wrong. It looks to me like the vast majority of XP in these first expeditions were gained by killing ye olde monsters, especially given some further rules clarifications on the next page (covered in the next installment!)

Current Questions for John and Len

1. How were you determining treasure amounts?
2. How much experience were you giving for monsters killed?
3. Do you remember what date you bought the White Box?

I ask the last question in particular, because the closest to exact publishing date I can find for the White Box is Gen Con, 1974. Assuming Gen Con has always been in the summer (which may not be the case), that means the Ryth Chronicle began only (approx.) three months after the game was published...

Tavis Allison, over at the The Mule Abides, just posted the character sheet (front & back) he created for his ODD game.


I. Love. It.

You. Will. Too.

All the denizens of and Adventurers in Otherness raise a cup in celebration---Will, aka coffee, aka Melvin the Magnificent, aka Sneerglaw the Balrog, aka Bahb the Draftee, has lit a torch in the Temple of Venus. 

Sorry it's been so long since I posted, but the Shadow of the Plague fell on House Kesher. Yea, it fell, but has passed on, may it not soon come again...