I spent the day listening to Ben Laurence’s Into the Megadungeon podcast, and catching up on some of the associated blogs, many of which I had lost contact with since the implosion of G+.
I also have been reading Stu Horvath’s illustrated history of gaming, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. It isn’t as detailed as Playing at the World, but it sequentially tags out just about every pertinent publication, as chronicled on the Vintage RPG Podcast and the associated instagram page of the same name.
Due to the plodding pace of my play by post game, not a great deal has transpired in Northport, but here are some highlights:
I smell silver – The group finally made their way into the Zelda-inspired fountain feature room (a duplicate of the one in my adventure , seriously the builders made a lot of duplicate features) and managed to extract silver from the acidic fountain without too much thrashing by the thing in the pool. They could have timed it perfectly, but decided to light the triggering fires sequentially instead of simultaneously, and ended up with a complication along with a fountain of silver. They have since hauled it out and attempted to engage in a verbotten activity: locating higher level characters operated in other threads (and played by the same player) to bail them out of a situation that is currently beyond their paygrade but easily correctable by the higher level character.
In the Village – not forbidden is the intersection of equal strength parties in the same area – in this case my Wuxia characters and the Vampire hunters , both in Veroigne, have met up with eachother. A little tension arose, because one group was hired by Baron Pequenaud to kill the vampires (after doing in The Beast of Veroigne) and the other group participated in the removal of the baron, in a trial by combat. Their participation involved the discovery of Pequenaud’s champion to be a Created warrior under control of Ales’ rival (when this game started, few of us had all of DF, let alone DFRPG, and a lot of old social disadvantages like Enemy and Evil Twin were in play. This is the second time in 9 years that this particular low-frequency enemy has surfaced) Bresnark, Who they removed from control of the creation by using magical silence. a little earlier they forced a siege to become a parley with extensive use of created wasps and excellent archery. The Vampire hunters had just headed back to Northport, restocked and accumulated a gang of cultists of Grome that the earthpriest could use to raise a circle of menhirs using ritual Shape Earth, creating a Henge where Grome could be worshiped.
Trading with Trolls. This group has not actually had a combat yet, but may be about to. They added a Swordsgnome against the Elder Gods and ran into first some of the lobotomized goblins the builders employ, but got nothing worse than some gloomy predictions using Elder Speech (I use Lingojam’s the Rl’yeh translator for this), and have since run into the other tools of the builders, Siege Beasts!
The road to Autumn is on a brief pause as another player dropped out, and I put in a call for weird, cozy spoopy characters as I intend to run the group through a mod of this adventure, very dear to my heart.
The former dragon disciples are packing up to visit an ice mage, and the Double damned group has used cartography to discover a plan to summon something using magically marked roof tiles laid out across the city in a familiar shape…
Northport 