See you around, Horror Month!
Issue #2, Session Report
Boo! I am sad to see the horror month ended few days ago and playing the games, Trophy Dark and Broken Tales was fun.
“No, look! I brought the statue with me here!”
As Root said in their recent Note, Trophy Dark’s Butter Princess1 was definitely a blast! I don’t want to spoil what this oneshot adventure is about and its title is self-explanatory. Instead, I can share what transpired during the session.
My character’s name is Duane (it/its)2 where it works as a car mechanic. Duane wanted to return to the state fair with a goal of bringing the statue back to its barn. However, it was troubled by its own guilt at the fact that it nearly ruined the previous year’s statue fair with a crashing vehicle under negligence.
A Devil’s Bargain mechanic was pleasant to add an unexpected “fun” flair to Duane’s troubling situations. This mechanic increased more stress on Duane mentally at every passing hour in the state fair. Its stress broke the ceiling when the night let the curtains down with some alarming explosive fireworks. The first thought that came to Duane’s mind was to steal the Butter Princess statue right under the attendees’ nose. It dashed for the delivery cart and loaded the statue in before escaping from the state fair. Afterwards, its last action led it to be banned from the state fair for lifetime.
By drawing my conclusion for Duane, Duane wrapped up its statement with the statue in its hands, “No, look! I brought the statue with me here!”
1 Butter Princess by Brian Sago
2Pardon my English as I’m getting used to typing with this type of pronoun.
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“Let’s go to the party!”
Red-hood Iskra scenario using Broken Tales went great!
Since we were playing a oneshot game, we started out with only two locations: the mansion and the old cemetery. The mansion was to get to know each other through roleplaying and meta-discussion. This game mechanics focused on the heavy narrative dialogues between the GM and players instead of their characters. The dialogues allowed us to forward the story from one scenario to the next scenario with new information given.
Once my players obtained information to progress the story, we entered the old cemetery where the scene became bloodily wild. These bandits camped out to hide their presence from the village but not from my players who just arrived recently. The player playing the Baba Yaga archetype conjured a magic that formed a black fog and gave the player’s Old Wolf archetype an opportunity to ambush the gang of bandits. My players’ ambush led the bandits to meet their unfortunate fate, but in the process, my players attracted the wolves as a result of their mixed success in their position check3. The player playing the Pied Piper archetype used some clever tricks to scare them away while Baba Yaga and Old Wolf encountered the villain4. After some couple of friendly fires, it did not take too long for Old Wolf to overcome the adversary with their rage before the players learned the hard truth about the villain afterwards.
The hard truth prompted the Pied Piper to sing out, “Let’s go to the party!” in concluding this game with their flaws revealed.
3 A Hunter makes a position check when they face a Threat or an opposing NPC in gaining an upper hand against them. More information can be found on Broken Tales quickstart.
4 The word “villain” is used to avoid the spoilers in the scenario.
Riding out the campaign waves
Life happens sometimes.
I’m grateful for my players to be able to play some RPG games despite my busy schedule. Today is November 2023. Figured that I should mention this one because hey, it’s rare to see ASL-fluent signers play indie RPGs for a long time.
What I’m playing so far:
- Old School Essentials. Halls of the Blood King, The Hole in the Oak
- Unconquered. Where the River Meets the Sea
- Vaults of Vaarn
Old School Essentials (OSE) is definitely a favorite system this year since it was a great transition to move away from D&D5e space. When my group and I finished The Incandescent Grottoes campaign using OSE, we liked it a lot, especially how we wrapped up this campaign with a traumatic ending. The funny part about my teammate’s eulogy for my dead character (they/them), Ethex, was when Ethex got buried right outside the church. Then my teammate would grab some cursed items to plant around their grave, which in process, created the cursed graveyard to introduce a new rumor in scaring the travelers off despite right next to the church. It was memorable because Ethex was the sole survivor until at the near end, they met their demise of being strangled by a mummy and my teammate was on their second character.
We agreed on continuing with new campaigns and new characters using OSE, which would be Halls of the Blood King5, and The Hole in the Oak6. Halls of the Blood King campaign is run by the same GM whose I finished the previous campaign with my teammate. Then my teammate wanted to try and run the Hole in the Oak by giving me and my GM an opportunity to play together as a team. These campaigns are currently ongoing, and…there was a character death! My character, Evoke the Magic-User (she/they), was ambitious to become a cultist by finding her answer beyond The Hole in the Oak and now got slain by the black skeleton carrying a glittering large silver sword - Rest in peace, Evoke.
As I mentioned in the previous issue, I decided to close the ongoing progress with the ink system after discussing with my players. Recently, I just finished the first session using Where the River Meets the Sea7, an adventure module for Unconquered. The first session went well though there’s always rooms for improvements to learn more. In fact, I am slowly learning how to read the hex-based map properly along with the table generators and the travel rules. Can’t wait to see more of it to come by, especially the fact that I drew the hex tiles to understand each tile’s environmental description.
Lastly, I’m playing in a sandbox-style campaign with the Vaults of Vaarn8 game with my teammates and my GM. This is a little different setup from my other campaigns mentioned above that averaged 3 hours of the session time. This setup is focused on the 6-hour long session to accommodate our busy schedule and we agree to be flexible in moving the dates based on our shared availability. So far, I’m liking this setup with my group because it’s convenient to have more contents out of the 6-hr session time. Right now, I’m wondering how we move forward the story progress since now we have a character death recently - Pearthika the Mycomorph, I hope your kins would bloom well. And I’m quite not sure if my character, Wermouth the NewBeast, will last longer in the next session, haha.
I’d love to type more about each campaign’s current progress, but I fear that it’d be too long to read. I decided to opt in for the emojis in summarizing these progress - keep it simple and straightforward. See below.
Campaign Progress Status
Where the River Meets the Sea. 🚢🩸🐗
Halls of the Blood King. 🩸🌱 👁️
The Hole in the Oak. ☠️ 🤡 🦎
Vaults of Vaarn. 🚀 🐒 🌵
Until then, happy campaigning!
