toyo's doghouse

The Slaying Stone - Session 1

Session 1 is in the books! In this session, we ran our first combat! Gnomes invaded the basement of the Temple of the Moon, crawling all over the party and trying their best to get their licks in. The party swept through them easily by the power of the Earth Priest's Breeze cantrip, which flings the gnomes around (all of whom have an inherent +2 Collision damage whenever they collide with something). Absolutely vaporized. After finishing up and promising to try to help Hoyt in the future, the party advanced to a library in the midst of town. The party is very sneaky and is able to easily wander around the sleeping goblins inside, who seem to be sorting through all of the books in the library, though none of them can read fine details in the dark. After gathering up alchemical reagents and a spell scroll, the party sends in the Scoundrel alone to pick the lock to another room, finding a goblin sleeping on a pile of explosives, a chest of some silver and some bombs for the taking, and a hole in the roof. Thada, the elf scoundrel, can see traces of magic, and notices that there are small coin-sized chunks of bronze wedged into the roof.

Temple Combat

With their heist successful, the party stumbles around the residential area around the city. Successfully arguing that at least one of these houses might be empty, I offer them a wine cellar to sleep in for the night. In the morning, the party discusses how to navigate the city in daylight - the party disguises their dwarf in green paint using some of the alchemical reagents they found, agrees that their super stealthy elf will be able to stay out of sight for as long as possible, and attaches their human bruiser as a bodyguard to their goblin priest. This arrangement means that common folk will go "huh" instead of "oh no!" and guards will interrogate them instead of immediately moving to arrest them.

With dawn breaking, the party wanders over to the Inn of the Tallest Fir, where the dwarf bard once worked as a bartender. The Inn's namesake fir has fallen in on the tavern, most of the walls have either been burned or generally rotted away, and the main floor has a massive pit in it. While the bard composes about it, the elf once again sees magic - this time, the same cotton candy pink color that the gnomes exploded into when killed. The whole bottom pit of the inn here is a sea of pink. The party contemplates throwing dynamite down there, but decides against it for now, and moves on to the market.

The party meets with a few shopkeepers here - Camay Cotton is a hedgemage who believes a curse has been placed on her town, and speaks with the earth priest for a bit about her services. The bard speaks with Heras Rowes, a weaver and basketmaker. She impersonates a noble and convinces him to go to Hu-jat, the militant hobgoblin leader of the town, and figure out if he's throwing any parties or anything of note for her to attend. Lastly, the party visits Pippal Cottook, a jeweler and purveyor of rare stones, who's stall was raided and slashed to bits last night, though nothing of value was taken. The party speaks with him, revealing the gnomes to him and asks about the Slaying Stone to him. He has no idea what to think, barely knowing that gnomes are real before this conversation, but suggests speaking to Rort, the librarian.

Tactiquest Reflections

Combat went great! Super fun although Breeze totally trivialized it. I had Hoyt threaten to wolf out if the gnomes got him, but he was able to sit in a corner totally unphased. One of the PCs did get reduced to exactly 0 hp due to a special from the scariest enemy and a followup attack, so it wasn't a total pushover. I threw an absurd number of Danger at the players (Tactiquest suggests 10+1 per level per player, so 44 for a challenging encounter; the gnomes were 64) due to how quickly wave 1 of the gnomes were wiped out, and if the werewolf attacked too, he would've added another 24. In the future, definitely going to have to think about the Tactics of gnomes so they don't get vaporized by an at-will ability and they present some kind of meaningful threat without me throwing an absurd number again.

I forget what exactly Tactiquest suggests for encounter checks but I basically said "Moving between a point? 1-in-6 chance of an encounter." This is probably a bad pace for a short game about fighting monsters and I need to kick it up a notch, but I also let the players know that the city militia is not very Aware of their presence yet and it would feel bad for me to just spike it up without players making choices that lead to it. Maybe after interacting with the libary crew, alarm will just Increase and it'll be a 2-in-6 chance from then on... Or I'll just start throwing gnomes or kobolds at them. Or a tiger will attack. We'll see!

The library encounter with the party's collection of Stealth skills felt like a good test for Tactiquest's skill system for me. The Earth Priest and Scoundrel both have Stealth, which means they are able to do tasks like an expert in the field. Stealth is the only skill with specific rules and says that PCs skilled at stealth "may hide with only the slightest obscurement, or move slowly without making noise" and get to do both if they have taken the skill twice like our Scoundrel. In a room full of sleeping goblins, the priest and scoundrel both chose to Move Without Noise, so they got to investigate the room without distrubing the sleeping goblins, and so does the Bard due to a task that allows them to share skills when helping with a task. In hindsight I should've maybe been harsher about the fact that it was, y'know, midnight in said library. But if I did, it would've just been "Ok the scoundrel goes in alone and does all of the same things."

Library Map

The lack of randomness in task resolution means players are always certain of their success when they approach a situation. Part of the workflow in my brain wants to think "Hey, the time pressure and risk of failure will make this interesting." But this is not that kind of game. This is a bring your own pressure kind of game. So in the future, I think I'll set up a clock or something that goes "You have THIS MANY interactions before failure comes for you." and the segments are impacted by skills or whatever. In this specific case nothing was really lost, because the players were still Making Choices, but. Food for thought.

GM Reflections

Last session I said, "I want to prep better!" and then I didn't. I thought about the library and the items within them and the market and didn't write down anything, and then I wrote down an encounter table and didn't use it at all. I didn't even prep XP numbers or loot for the encounter that was actively happening at the end of the session! However... everything was fine, really. I can't tell how much the players felt delayed by me scrambling mid game, but it was easy to pick out items, PCs felt happy with the pile of Fairy Dust I threw at them (I gave them FOUR when the book recommends ONE monster part from an encounter lmao), even the library looting when I said "fuck it, take items from the explosivist enemy stat block" was exciting to them. Throwing together NPCs was fine and fun and I liked roleplaying as them, although I wish I gave Camay more of a clue about what's going on and had Real Prep for her. I may have learned the wrong lesson from this but! I am quite happy with myself.

Also, I may have made a mistake? I picked a 4e adventure to convert because I wanted easy combats to slot in and a gauntlet-style adventure where they beat the shit out of enemies because like, yeah, that's the system we're playing. However, when converting it, I added things Other Than Fighting, and now it's a much more classic investigate-a-location adventure. Which is awesome, I love those. I have this tug of war where I don't feel like I'm playing to the system's strengths, but all of the game is working really well for what I'm doing with it, so. I don't know how to feel about it yet. Next game/act though, definitely need some more Stuff Attacks You.

Lastly, my prep is looking to be a little more flexible. The party wants to return to the gnome-pit next session and seem to think it's going to be a bigger deal than I originally intended, but I'm super down for that honestly. Gnomes are cool and if they want to be free of the gnomes after a single encounter I will allow them to waltz into their home base and eradicate them via Breeze. There have been some whispers of going to the Library as well so I'll prepare for that in case of a pivot, but I have that in my mind's eye too.

Prep List

#playreport