OSR Trilemma Report: Lanterns and Loquaciousness

The winter quarter is in fulls swing and I'm running games at a proper table again. I got just two players this week (the rest were busy, not a good sign) one of whom was new to old-school games. Having a smaller party, I dug into the Trilemma adventures, and selected The Call of the Light based on Skerples' recommendation. The adventure was interesting, but a bit empty for my tastes. So I mixed together some recent elements form the blogosphere and modifying the adventure a good deal.

Our victims cast:

The Batman (Bat-ling Barbarian)
Judas the Tax-Collector (Bat-ling Orthodox Wizard)

The Session

With The Batman on a little vacation from his dungeon delving with the rest of his party, he returned to his hometown of Greepton, where he also found his distant cousin Judas. Judas was sheltering there after being kicked out of several towns for his tax collection, and was looking for any way to pay off his Wizard Student Loans.

Not popular folk, those tax collectors

The Batman found his hometown in quite unusual circumstances. Greep, the loquacious and euphonious talking frog for which the town was named, had lost his voice. Massive rainstorms had caused serious flooding, but their westerly direction was unusual for this time of year. Scabrous, the local poxy hunchback, had disappeared, though nobody really cared. The real cause for concern was the disappearance of the priest some days before, and his subsequent reappearance stark naked, soaked to the bone, gibbering from hypothermia and smelling like honey.

In his ramblings, the priest pointed to the old forest to the west, and the ancient tower that sane men avoided, and which wizards were compelled to approach. The two cousins decided this was the perfect time for a little adventure.

They came upon the tower in the forest, passing over the bridge, examining the statues of the 'twins' and the carved head of the spirit Caiaphas (don't ask me why, that's just the first name that came to mind), which has black stains around its lips. They passed inside to find a great square pit in the center of the room, a vat of writhing oil next to it, a weapons rack, a set of stairs leading up and engraved tiles in the floor.

They experimented with the oil, discovering potential anti-magic properties. The Batman picked up an ornate lance from the weapons rack, adding it to his already significant arsenal. They read the engraved tiles, finding them to be a record of deaths of 'twins' in the five-hundred years since the tower was built, the name Nurabel prominent among them.

Resisting the urge to jump into the pit (Judas' ludicrous Wisdom score saved him several times) they climbed up the stairs. They found a pool of water surrounded by four pillars, glowing with a soft blue light. The open balcony was slick with water, carpets and books of poetry absolutely soaked. A golden bowl covered with a cloth safeguarded three chunks of some confection, a sweet, honey-smelling pastry the players couldn't immediately identify.

The pillars were engraved with runes for magical rituals, one of them reading 'Mellified Man'. They found a little vial floating in the pool, with a tiny fairy inside. When released, he effusively thanked the party and introduced himself as Morblin, the grooming fairy, imprisoned by the mad sage Albericht, who was having an affair with a raincloud.

I've never watched this show but this is roughly what I imagined

The party heard lovely singing upstairs, and did in fact find Albericht, a small, gaunt man in an oversized robe, who was using Greep's lovely voice. The room at the top of the tower is his makeshift home, as well as containing seven beds of soil and an old frieze covered in jewels and gold leaf. After some tense introductions with Albericht, they get down to talking. All in all, he's a rather gracious host, who explains the process for creating Mellified Man (much to the players' horror) and why the villagers went missing.

The hunchback was taken for the rain to feel a new human texture, and the priest was brought to conduct a eulogy for the rain's grandfather, the northern warm front that broke several days past. Learning more than they ever wanted to about the intimate lives of water elementals, the sage casually mentioned that this tower was built in ages past to defend against the robot incursion.

The players agreed to leave him alone and instead investigated the pit, and the supposed robots down there. Setting up a rope to climb down, Judas found a gigantic pile of metal parts, as well as dozens of metal automata climbing it towards a flickering blue lamp, before they inevitably fell back down only to do so again. In the midst of this noisy, endless cycle, he also finds a doorway blocked with iron bars.

He climbed back up and they experiment with the oil, finding it made the automata go crazy, and then found... Albericht, coming down the stairs, totally different in his demeanor. It turned out to be a changeling, one of the 'twins' preserved in the soil beds upstairs, who every now and again woke up to find it had been sleeping for centuries and everyone it knew was dead. It later returned to rebury itself, a process Albericht said they repeat every few weeks, and never remember.

The cousins finally decided to force open the iron bars with Judas' Knock spell. Beyond it they found a shaft leading down gods-know how far, from which sulfur and hot air blew. There was also a side room, in which an Armadillo stood guard over a small hoard of items. It turned out this Armadillo could talk, and was an absolute asshole.

Come at me you little bitch! Think I can't take you?

It was actually a spirit of some variety who had taken up residence there, gradually amassing a hoard from items on the destroyed automata. The players tried to take the hoard but were rebuffed. The Armadillo proposed a gamble, a game of riddles. The Batman counter-offered with a round of bare-knuckle boxing, which the Armadillo turned out to be totally up for. The stakes? If The Batman wins, a choice from the hoard, Batman's preference being a jeweled abacus. If the Armadillo won? The Batman's given birth name.

Judas stood off to the side, planning to get at the hoard and steal some gold and items from the hoard. The Armadillo grew to human size, squaring up against the barbarian. Round 1, the combatants just using their fists, managed to rebuff each others' attacks. Round 2, the Armadillo got a good jab in, and The Batman realized something was up. The Armadillo's claws were like those of a ghoul, resulting in damage unless he writhed on the floor for a round. He ate the damage, pushing through and landing a pair of hits on the creature.

Judas chose that moment to dive past them into the hoard, grabbing at a bottle of Firewater. The Armadillo landed a critical hit on The Batman, and he chose to go down on this one. The Armadillo turned to whale on Judas, and The Batman had just enough. Pulling out his axe, the boxing match turned into a full-on combat. Judas opened up the Armadillo's shell with Knock and the raging barbarian sliced his back open.

Critically failing his morale roll but backed into a literal corner, the Armadillo, insisted this was all fun and games, and he hadn't broken the rules. Batman was having none of it, and with his next attack bisected the Armadillo from shoulder to wedding tackle. The creature's last words were, 'Send e back to hell,' and a chorus of screaming voices rose from the shaft.

Grabbing the hoard and booking it, they also returned to the top floor to loot the frieze. The whole thing would have been worth an immense amount of money as an art piece, but they didn't have the people or equipment to move a whole wall. This called for the UltraViolet Grasslands looting rules: roll 1d6+level, harvest x% of the item's value in materials while reducing its total value by x*10%.

Looting isn't nice

As the cousins packed up, they found that a serious rainstorm had hit the tower, and Albericht was lying naked only balcony soaking himself. The players cheered him on while the sage drew a curtain closed, and they returned to town in good spirits.

The Take

70gp in various coins
Firewater, literally elemental fire in liquid form, drink to take 1d6 damage and become immune to fire for 1 hour (20gp).
Abacus made from balls of crystal, ivory, silver, gold and vitrified eyeballs(30gp).
Agate snuff container in the shape of a woman’s head, long since smoked by the armadillo (15gp).
Small gold-filigree box, contains saints bones that rattle in the presence of lies(30gp).
60gp in gold leaf and jewels looted from the frieze.

The lance, which has certain properties, the players did not discover this time round.

For a total of 225gp and a bunch of XP, almost enough for our long-adventuring Batman to level up. 

And conspicuously missing, Greep's voice. The PCs forgot about it until the end, and decided to leave Albericht be. 

Source

Lessons and Screwups

I think this is one of the better games I've run. It was mostly roleplay, and it was gonzo weird in just the right way. I wager the punch-up with the demon armadillo will be damn memorable.

That said, there's a lot to improve on. I started modifying The Call of the Light just a day before, and while the blogosphere (especially The Lawful Neutral's excellent recent post, How to Serve Man) provided me with great material to add into the holes, it needed more thinking through. Given the time, I would have made a wholly different dungeon with a few similar elements.

Some parts, like the ritual pillars and especially the sleepers in the soil, I had no idea how to run. That seems to be a general theme with me using Trilemma adventures. Great content, but I have to twist it around to know how to use it at the table. Those parts felt underused to me, but for my players who couldn't see behind the curtain, it thankfully appeared to be more mysterious.

The titan among the heap was passed over, since I didn't describe it as being alive or active, and I'm not sure if it's supposed to be. The players totally skipped over the heap itself, since I didn't hint that there was treasure in it. Good thing I added other, minor treasures, which I quite liked. Weird and unique, but non-magical treasure like the abacus and the snuff container are a level of treasure I aspire to make for myself.

I don't know if ghoul agony counts as 'pain' but if it does, the barbarian should have been immune to it. Reading the post now, I think I ran it wrong too. I had no intention for the Armadillo to fight the party, but the character worked so well with the idea of the boxing match. I had planned that if the party killed it, a smoke cloud would fly up from the shaft and possess the body, making the players fight a lantern ghoul. I ended up just giving the Armadillo the ghoul's stats, though I forgot about the lantern eyes in the last round when they would have been used.

There were other things too. I added in a sentient Hand of Glory that could be randomly encountered, and Scabrous the hunchback was also on that table, but I didn't set a place he could normally be encountered. I might move from the Angry GM's Tension Pool to Skerples dungeon procedure, at least for really short dungeons like this. Then again, the buildup of dice has a wonderful effect on the players.