Background
This is the second part of my play report for EmemyCo’s The Fangwitch’s Falls, read Session One if you haven’t. The module can be purchased here, or alongside Em’s currently kickstarting module Try The Beetle Milk.
I’m using Brighter Worlds, which is my own hack of Cairn, Electric Bastionland, and Macchiato Monsters. You can pick it up here for free, or look at the SRD here, but if you imagine “Whimsical Cairn with Class Abilities” you’re most of the way there.
Previously On…
Granny Hexwhistle
Witch on a flying broom with a small, frog that sweats hallucinogen. All-around bad person.
Mercutio Smock
Gentleman and Runewright extraordinaire, crafting interesting logic-based magics.
Pele
Cleric of her Small God: a tiny golem with a volcanic head who is the God of Magmatic Renewal.
The party arrived at the town of Mahruko, chased down a rumor of quarreling ghosts, murdered some chickens cursed demons, treated with a magic 8 ball skull-based Seer, and chatted with two strangely long and tall normally proportioned fish sisters.
Overnight they’re joined by a new party member (our usual fourth player who was unavailable during session one):
Tibbius Sacrum
A Bag of Bones: a walking, talking skeleton wielding a (different) skeleton’s leg. Apparently the Seer’s college roommate. Able to switch between terrifying spooky skeleton and comical spoopy skellington on a whim.
GM’s Note: We spent maybe a minute trying to justify why a skeleton was joining the party, but I mostly didn’t think it was important for it to make sense “in the fiction”. Prioritizing speed over realism, we ended up with the absurdist idea that the Seer suggested he join this party because they “seemed cool” and everyone rolled with it.
Session Two
“The only good man is a dead man.” - Granny Hexwhistle welcoming Tibbius into the party.
The party (now including one boney boi) enjoys a morning teatime with the Yamuna Sisters before heading on towards the lake. They pass some strange stone structures and scrimshaw on the way, but cursory examination reveals no deeper or magical meaning.
Arriving at the lake the party spots a small boat riding deep in the water, containing two men waving for help. Mercutio whips up a set of linked runes carved into some driftwood: one to move the driftwood towards the men, and a second which triggers on contact with another piece of wood (the boat) that sets up a water current to bring the boat the shore.
As the boat is carried closer, it becomes apparent what the problem is: the boat is jam packed full of fish! To the point of nearly sinking!
GM’s Note: There’s a random table to determine what issue the fishermen are dealing with. I was about to roll on it when I spotted “Too Many Fish” as an entry, and decided that was far too funny to not be the case.
The party immediately begins questioning how the boat ended up in this situation, and why the fishermen don’t even have any fishing equipment. The fishermen have no good answers, which makes the party even more suspicious. Granny notices that one of the fishermen is wearing some sort of amulet beneath his shirt, and, being a covetous witch, immediately decides she wants it.
She makes a grab for it, which the fisherman objects to. Mercutio, always willing to escalate violence levels, pins the fisherman’s arms to allow Granny Hexwhistle to try and grab the amulet. The second fishermen, seeing the (totally unjustified) attack on his companion moves to try and push Granny back, who retaliates with a blast of magic. This breaks his spirit and he takes off running towards the woods, pursued by Granny on her broomstick.
GM’s Note: The fishermen’s initial inability to answer questions and their suspicious actions was a result of me not knowing why they had so many fish in their boat. I was mentally scrambling for a good reason, but in the mean time they were answering evasively. So, that much is my fault. What follows I take no responsibility for.
Tibbius begins tossing fish from the boat one by one back into the lake as a form of intimidation (???), while Pele and Mercutio interrogate Fisherman A. They find that the amulet is a large jade fish, apparently enchanted to make fish hop into the boat on their own. Despite belonging to a long line of excellent fishers this (still unnamed, whoops) fisherman had no skill at all. To fix this problem, the fisherman acquired this amulet trade from the Fae who are currently in the Deep Woods.
Meanwhile Granny Hexwhistle is circling the fleeing man on her broom, cackling madly the entire time.
Me: Okay so what is your goal with all this?
Granny’s Player: I want to completely terrify him, make this a total nightmare.
Me: Well, mission accomplished.
Hexwhistle eventually paralyzes him with the Staring Contest spell, then shoves her frog familiar in his mouth to dose him with hallucinogens, ultimately making him pass out from the extreme and wildly varying sensory inputs.
GM’s Note: Brighter Worlds uses a “Eulogy” system for earning XP. Anytime a character does something noteworthy enough to be read out at their eventual funeral gets added, and you gain 1 XP. Anything on the line gets voted on by the table. It serves to both let the table meter their own advancement rate, and also adds a “best of” campaign record to every character sheet.
In this case, the table voted that the extreme terrorizing of the fisherman qualified as an entry for Granny Hexwhistle’s Eulogy. I argued against it, both on the grounds that this feels like something Granny does all the time, and also because this is something I’d call a perverse incentive. Alas, I was outvoted.
Returning to the rest of the group with the passed out Fisherman B in tow, the party puts together the whole story. Tibbius dumps the boat full of fish back into the lake right before the party remembers they wanted to have a large gift of food to potentially appease Old Tago (the giant monster that apparently lives in the lake).
They send the two, now traumatized, fishermen off towards the not-at-all suspicious Yamuna Sisters’ house after “confiscating” the fish charm. Following some discussion the party heads towards the cemetery to follow up on the rumor they’d heard about the gravekeeper, as well as it being on the way to the Deep Woods to meet the Fae.
Me: Wow, they’re actually pretty close to finishing the module. That’s way faster than we usually get through things.
My Players: I know we’re literally right next to our goal, but instead lets go head off in the opposite direction to meet (and probably pick fights with) the weird ancient creatures we just heard about.
The Cemetery is flooded, both with bog water and ghouls. There’s a large mound in the center with a huge Toad sitting atop, as well as a particular tree-mushroom that the ghouls seem to be centered around. Granny heads to that tree-mushroom on her broom, while the rest of the party kites the slow moving ghouls to reach the topped mound.
Granny finds, and rescues, the beleaguered (and previously missing) grave-keeper before meeting up with the rest of the party near the giant toad. The rescued gravekeeper is sufficiently polite and thankful for the rescue the charm Hexwhistle, and informs them that the toad is Gol, a local Demigod of the Ponds. Gol is asleep, and ignores all attempts by the party to wake him. Pele eventually speaks through his God and collapses half of the mound Gol is on, forming a ramp for him to roll down. Unfortunately some godly power keeps Gol floating in empty space.
GM’s Note: I gave Gol a WIL Save to remain in place despite the ground being removed from beneath him. My logic at the time was that the module lists some specific ways Gol could be woken, and I took that as a further implication that it should be difficult to do so.
In retrospect, I should have let this attempt work. If for no reason than the image of a carriage sized toad rolling down a ramp into a crowd of ghouls is extremely funny.
It would also also have played into my favorite line of text in the module, which is that he “prefers to roll around like a misshapen wheel.”
Realizing that their attempt to displace Gol has left an easy path for the hoard of ghouls to get at them, the party makes themselves scarce (after making sure the gravekeeper is headed back towards Mahruko safely).
Onward to the Deep Woods! The sun is beginning to set just as the party reaches the outskirts of the forest. Pitiful wailing and the sound of heavy footsteps emerges from deeper into the forest, causing the party to prepare for combat only to see a giant mushroom man fleeing in terror from a cloud of butterflies.
Granny Hexwhistle gets very lucky, and manages to kill the magical, illusion-projecting butterfly (and feed it to her familiar), then immediately turns to try and extract some recompense from the mushman. Gari, the mushman in question, explains that he’d been chased by the terrible butterflies who kept putting him to sleep with magic. He is very agreeable to preparing food in exchange for his rescue, but seems to be a bit unsure as to what food actually is.
After a few minutes of burning a mushroom, dirt, and pine needle patty over a fire the party realizes that Gari is simply too much of a himbo for them to exploit, and sends him on his way.
They make camp and settle in for the night.
Brighter World’s Playtesting Note: By this point Granny had earned 2 XP and her player was looking to purchase a new Advanced Ability. Nothing on the sheet was speaking to them, and the player really enjoys looking through spell lists and making careful choices. I offered them the ability to take on an ability from the (currently unpublished) Crystal Wizard which would give them a choice of any spell or ritual each time XP is spent. An example of my attempts to make different Callings appeal to different player types being semi-successful.
As a point of comparison, in my other group a player with the Demonic Sorcerer Calling is absolutely loving the totally random mirror of this Ability.
After Thoughts
This group has a bit of a tendency to go from 0 to 60 when it comes to random violence, those poor fishermen. The fishermen incident is a good illustration of the level of detail I like in a module though, which Fangwitch’s hits quite well. Enough to provide a framework that I can run and (relatively) quickly spin up new ideas, but not so much where things I invent are going to cause contradictions later.
I recognize that a lot of people will want more detail or structure, but for me this is perfect. It’s a great middle ground where a single read through lets me understand the world enough to run without further prep and the flexibility to add more to the world.
Session 3 of the play report will go up whenever we manage to get out of scheduling hell and play session 3. Maybe this week? We’ll see!
It was this week, huzzah, read Part 3 here: https://academyofdoors.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-fangwitchs-falls-session-three-play.html
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