Elder Scrolls GLOG Report 1: Jailbreak

For my first post of 2020 (New Years' travel was hard alright! Those saints are coming along, don't you worry) a report on the first 'session' of Elder Scrolls GLOG game. I started running it on the Discord about two weeks ago, selecting my players from frequent commenters on several channels whom I knew would check in frequently.

They all made their character using the rules from this post, rolling 3d6 down the line for stats, and then getting their race, birthsign and class. Some chose to roll for all of these, making effectively random characters.

As is the conceit of all Elder Scrolls installments, the players began as prisoners, so I also asked each player for the crime they were convicted of that landed them in an Imperial penal colony, and whether or not they did it. Delightfully, none of them came out and said for sure they were innocent.

Our victims cast

Vilamon Hawker, Redguard Destruction Wizard - kahva
Vilamon crushed the skull of one of his debtors with elemental energies in broad daylight, in front of a dozen witnesses. The whole of his legal defense was, 'come at me, see what happens.' By far the beefiest of the party, described as 'swole.'

Gwynabyth Muriel Ysciele, Breton Conjurer - retrograde tardigrade xenograft
Gwynabyth objected to Imperial colonization of the Reach, and assaulted a lawman's office with a squadron of skeletons. The sweet old lady with a necromancy-related terrorism charge was a highlight.

Riadell Fernhollow, Bosmer (Wood Elf) Knight - mtb-za
Riadell was imprisoned when a rival baron he had a known grudge against disappeared during a major feast night. Riadell admitted to killing and ritualistically eating him. May or may not be covering for his cousin who actually did it. Has earned the enmity of the Imperial Navy captain Sir Patrick Stewart of the Imperial Sea Ship Enterprise.

Verdgrss-Wears-Copper, Argonian Hunter - grimlucis
Verdgrss was imprisoned for alleged crimes of moon dust refinement, arson and very public aggravated assault. The rest of his origins remain shrouded in mystery for the moment.

Hama'ak, Khajiit Thief - Walfalcon
Hama'ak was an innocent victim of racial profiling. Well, not innocent. The skooma he was arrested for was planted. His actual stash was in a much more secure location. Also arrested for loitering (he was actually there ten minutes longer than was reported, just invisible). Also arrested for 'vagrancy' and 'resisting arrest' from when the police removed him from his 'lawfully occupied under-a-bridge-home.' Wants to become Spiderman, may succeed with the right Daedric patron.



The Game

The party begin as prisoners at the Fort Firemoth Penal Colony, just off the Western Coast of Vvardenfell. They've been there weeks, months, even years, but at no point has the prison's goal—using prisoner labor to mine the ebony present on the archipelago—come to pass. Instead, they continue to suffer indignities at the hands of Warden Eplear, an unusually short Wood Elf whose personality can be summed up as, 'Napoleon Complex.'

The PCs roleplay and get to know each other. They also experience Eplear's temper and good hearing firsthand; the Bosmer can put an arrow through your clothes at a hundred paces. A prison barge appears on the horizon, but doesn't stop by the Fort, instead just passing back east. Speculating that it contained the protagonist (they're savvy like that) the PCs get a chance to escape.

A mining team breaks through to an old tunnel; the PCs, the most recent target's of the Warden's ire, get sent in to poke around and look for ebony. One of the new guards, a cowardly Khajiit named J'Hanir, is sent in with them.

Searching through the tunnels, they encounter a sump with the corpse of a dreugh outside it and a slaughterfish swimming inside. Calming it with Riadell's Beast Tongue spell, they dive in and pick up the first valuable item they've found on Firemoth; an ancient Dwarven bracelet inscribed with the words, 'I [symbol for love] Narsis.' This bracelet just so happens to be attached to a rather recent Dunmer corpse.

With their first hint at the Alchemy system, a little treasure and a rusted mace, the guard realizes he's really not in charge anymore. Delving deeper through the tunnels, the party finds a supply cache; some weapons, a set of leathers and a potion. It seems that somebody has been making themselves a little base. Several of the items bore the same symbol: a set of scales, with a small insect heavier than a large reptile.

They also find a shrine to Roris the Martyr, and Dunmer saint. This was their introduction to the Shrine system I cooked up. The PCs were desperate for any advantage they could get, and the floating Fortify Health spell provided by Roris was very attractive. The party decided to forgo it though, when they learned about Roris's strictures, the third being to, "daily curse the depravities of Argonia and its people."

They instead suited up and continued onward, hearing the sound of the ocean. Indeed, they found the tunnels opened into a hidden sea cove, with signs of habitation: hammocks, carpets, a chest of spare clothing. And a small ship, little bigger than a gondola, was approaching as the sun set.



Rushing to explore the rest of the base to decide what o do with these people, the party found a meeting room with a locked chest smelling faintly of acid, and beyond it... an empty slave pen, with enervating manacles. Whoever these people were, they were stealing prisoners from above and taking them away. Could they be in cahoots with the warden?

The party resolves to ambush these would-be slavers, setting up a barricade in a chokepoint beyond the cove, leaving one of Gwynabyth's summoned skeletons playing dead on the ground and hiding the other in the now-empty clothes chest. The ship comes in and three Dunmer jump off. One dressed in garish robes with a staff, another in leathers and bedecked in rings, the third heavily armored and armed.

The party makes very quick work of them, thanks to both good tactics and luck. The skeletons block off their retreat to the boat while Vilamon and Riadell jump into melee, Verdgrss shoots arrows, Hama'ak stalks behind them invisibly and Gwynabyth provides moral support from behind the barricade. The enemy rogue summons the power of St Roris to heal the mage... and the spell fizzles. The mage then tries to hit Vergrss with a magic missile, which might severely wound him and... also fizzles the spell. They whiff all their attacks while the PCs regularly hit, and the action economy takes it from there.

Highlights from the fight: Riadell cleaves off the rogue's arm with his axe and leaves him to bleed on the floor. Verdgrss delivers a badass line as he drives an arrow straight through the mages' heart, "Roris died as he lived. Pissing himself in fear!" Gwynabyth called her skeletons, 'rattlebags' and I personally named then Tibia and Grin.

The warrior, outnumbered and demoralized, surrenders, and the party gets to interrogating and looting. Among the loot, the rogue's severed arm had a signet ring on the thumb, bearing the same scale symbol as earlier, which the party is unable to identify. Hama'ak also goes back to the chest they found earlier, and investigates how to deal with the magical acid trap.



They find that the warrior's name is Urvil Llerith, and he claims to be capturing prisoners with the permissions of the warden. J'Hanir protests. He claims that the scale-scrib-alit symbol on the ring and weapons is that of the Dorvayn family in Balmora, one of the major House Hlaalu powers. He claims that the Dorvayn would never take him back, but their enemies, the Oran in Suran, would pay a hefty ransom to get inside information. The party is not completely convinced.

They use the signet ring to disarm the trap on the chest through a hidden keyhole, and find a set of documents. 1. A letter from one Lord Avon Oran to his cousin Brothes Oran, ordering the 'Firemoth enterprise' closed and a return to their base in the Bitter Coast. 2. An unfinished draft letter back, claiming that the first missive and the lord's retainer was lost at sea. 3. A defaced scrap of a ledger. 4. A strange riddle, "When you find yourself missing home, seek out snake’s head beyond true passage, and follow Azura’s eye to your hearth."

The warrior backtracks, claiming that Brothes Oran was the rogue they killed earlier, and that he was playing double agent with the Dorvayn family. The party is still unconvinced, but resolves to flee the island and escape their imprisonment. They spy just above the horizon a light, the Seyda Neen lighthouse. Slipping the enervating manacles on the slaver and sticking both him and the papers in the boat's secret compartment, the party, two skeletons and a former Imperial guard crowd aboard the tiny vessel, setting forth...

TO MORROWIND.

Bogdan Timichenko

Takeaways

I ran a play-by-post game once before, but it fizzled out due to lack of player coordination and ended up turning into a solo campaign. Choosing players whom I knew and had talked to before, and who were on the Discord frequently assured that play would be much quicker than other forums.

In particular, the combination of GLOG combat with party-wide rolls made the combat lightning-fast. Most of the time is spent in deliberation and roleplay, with a good deal of exploration as well.

The starting 'dungeon' I put them through was very, very short. Considering the text based pace I'm okay with it being very short, since we want to get to the good stuff and free exploration quickly, but if I were to run it at a table I would make it a good deal larger and more challenging.

The shrine of Roris was my first draft of the Shrine system, which at the time I considered to be neat, but not game-changing. I got excellent reactions from them, saying they were all going to steal it for their own games, which is the sincerest flattery. I decided then to write it up formally, and a week later it's by far my most read and liked post of all time. Funny how that works.

With the shrine system, getting the PCs to roleplay and consider the meaning of different saints and cults was a must. I declared victory when my players went without a free magic dice to avoid participating in racism against Argonians, both because one was a party member and because they had nothing in particular against them.

Posting pace will vary dramatically, and is largely out of the GM's control. Players will converse with each other both in and out of character, and your goal is primarily to portray the world and answer questions. Whenever you post as a GM, always leave clear options for moving forward beside what the players may come up with themselves, and they'll take care of the rest.

I got a lot of mileage out of pre-writing some parts of the adventure that I knew the party would encounter, namely the introduction and the documents. Beside loot lists, the opening narration upon entering a new place and whatever documents they may read, there's not much more you can fruitfully pre-write. For the players' sake and your own be terse and compact at most times.