Escape The Kidnapper's Keep - Play Report

This is a play report of a minidungeon written by Mellonbread. I used the opportunity to playtest the Begone FOE! Funnel ruleset, which I updated to the most recent version of the game here.

With the collapse of the City of Tontes, the Marble Cliffs have become anarchic. Petty lordlings reassert their authority, controlling the surrounding landscape from fortified keeps. The Beggarmen, an entrepreneurial gang of lumpenproles and rural bandits, has started a ransom racket out of a stolen castle, kidnapping random people to sell back to their loved ones.

People like you. You've spent months in a smelly cell, being tortured by bored jailers who demand a ransom that probably isn't coming.

That was until a cannonball came through the ceiling.

The castle is under siege, and you've got a way out. But if you fled now you'd just be another batch of faceless nobodies on the frontier. And being penniless losers is exactly how you ended up in this situation to begin with.

So fuck that. You're gonna rob these assholes blind.

Fallout: Yellowstone - Companions

Deimos

Grandini (player of Slim Al Swaywood) and I put together some NPC companions from our recent run of Fallout: Yellowstone, based on an old draft I found for Fallout: Two Sun. 

The players repeatedly recruited NPCs throughout the playtest, so it seemed appropriate to codify their behaviour into actual mechanics. If you want a Google Docs version of this supplement, find it here.

Unknown Armies: I Wear No Mask

Another jam entry, this one for Katts' All Hallows Jam. A ritual for Unknown Armies.

B-trndl

Do you like hurting people? Good.

Delta Green: All My Dreams Are About Raids

A belated entry to Luis Vito's JUKEBOX Jam. A Disciples of the Worm minidungeon for Delta Green.

Once a Spanish trade post, then a Mexican army fort, then an antebellum slave plantation. Now a small citrus farm in the Texan backcountry, producing sweet Marrs oranges and Mexican key limes.

The locals don't have much to say about it. The workers keep to themselves, act polite, and pay in cash. They're not all Mexicans and Guatemalans either, a few had odd foreign accents. Maybe European? 

They don't see the tunnels twisting beneath the earth. The crates of guns and bombs and worse hidden beneath sweet-smelling citrons. The parasites coiling inside perforated intestines, pain barely dulled by fistfuls of pills. The thing in the pool, robbed of language but still begging for death in wordless screams.

Fallout: Yellowstone - Session 4

Adam, Slim, and Tex rolled into Pelican Springs on their new motorbikes, saddlebags filled to bursting with looted energy weapons. The corpses of the garrison littered the snowy ground, bearing the distinct wounds of the Rangers' obsidian swords. They found Ranger Rhondie, Doc Klover, and Hana the Khan inside the old ranger cabin, nursing severe injuries. After applying first aid, they loaded the wounded onto the back of their kettenkrad and made haste for Lake. 

Fallout: Yellowstone - Session 3

The Posse awoke inside their lodgings on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. While the Scabs were busy loading a timber barge for delivery to West Thumb, they arrayed their equipment and plotted their activities for the day. The gang knew the Eighties, a raider gang holed up at Pelican Springs only a few miles to the east, were searching for mercenaries to help run the Khan blockade keeping them from exchanging slaves for precious fuel from the Roughneck microstate up north. Their plan: pretend to work for the raiders, lead them into a killbox, claim the 1,000 caps reward posted by the Great Khans.

Fallout: Yellowstone - Session 2

The Posse set off from the Loggers' hidden camp to Yellowstone Forever, eager to spend their ill-gotten scrip. They didn't have enough to afford medicine for the entire village, but 1,000 caps of antibiotics would buy them some much needed time. Thanks to the outdoorswomanship of Freehand the Logger, the gang made quick progress through the dense treelines and steep slopes of Mary Mountain.

Fallout: Yellowstone - Session 1

This is a play report of a Fallout sandbox, written by Mellonbread.

Your prairie village in Montana has been struck by plague. A burrowing creature with a glowing belly bit a child, who fell ill a few days later. By the time the town doctor noticed the swelling in the kid’s lymph nodes, the disease had already spread among the populace. It’s easy to treat with antibiotics, but the town doesn’t have nearly enough. The caravan was due a week ago, and hasn’t shown up yet.

You were spared the ravages of the disease. You’ve been sent South into the seething cauldron of Yellowstone, to search for enough medicine to save your town. You were given a healthy supply of bits (the silver tokens used as money in Montana) and the last of the stimpaks (a rare trade good from down South, since Broc Flower and Xander Root don’t grow in the tundra).

As you travel South from Gardiner along the 89, the air smells like pollen, flowers and sulfur. The peaks and valleys are covered with snow, but everywhere else you see evidence of Spring. You heard this place was spared the worst ravages of the nuclear dust storms that swept the region after the war, but you'd never seen it for yourself.

There's a fort up ahead.

Born Without Sin (GLoG Class: Artificer)

My humble Glåugust submission. A class that is neither a fighter, a wizard, a cleric, nor a thief. 

 

Pompeo Batoni

"I shall not bore you with a catalog of her virtues and beauties; you would have to see her and hold her to judge her justly. Her bitter blade was an ell in length, straight and square-pointed as such a sword's should be. Man-edge and woman-edge could part a hair within a span of the guard, which was of thick silver with a carven head at either end."

"Her grip was onyx bound with silver bands, two spans long and terminated with an opal. Art had been lavished upon her; but it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so, and so art had nothing to give her."
Shadow of the Torturer [108]

Review: Into The Wyrd & Wild - Monsters

Archons March On is reviewing monster manuals. Someone on the GLoG server mentioned he could look at Into the Wyrd & Wild, by Charles Ferguson-Avery. That reminded me I had a half-finished review of that book in my drafts folder. There's no time like the present, so I've restarted work on it.

While I finish my test drive of the book's Wilderness Dungeon procedures, I decided to cast an eye over it's extensive list of monsters. 

I'm not the first to review this product. Skerples from Coins and Scrolls has levelled a rather scathing critique at it. Despite having playtested the book on multiple occasions (unlike Skerples) I don't really disagree with his conclusions. Into the Wyrd & Wild does lack the tight procedures and gameable random tables that are otherwise the cornerstone of the OSR.

In fact, the book is basically a cargo cult of Patrick Stuart's Veins Of The Earth. Down to the statblock design, exploration procedures, and layout of its maps. And like most mimicries, the original does things better. But I still enjoy it. It helps that I sympathise with Charles' work, given that this blog is mostly me aping other creators I like. This very post uses a format taken from somewhere else.

Anyway. With that preamble done, let's look at some monsters.