Shopping in Gosterwick and the DFRPG Arden Vul Campaign

Some of my players seem to enjoy shopping for equipment a bit too much.  "What can we buy here?" is a common question.  Here's what they've visited so far in the town of Gosterwick:

• Torunn the Smith.  Torunn, a large Wiskin woman, seems to be the best smith in town, or at least the best smith they've met.  She showed samples of good, fine, balanced, and dwarven weapons, and both good and fine armor, so it appears that she can produce high-quality items and has apprentices to do the more mundane work.  She only works with metal though; she doesn't do leather or wooden items.  In addition to selling weapons and armor, she was also willing to provide training in Armory and Connoisseur (Weapons).
• Creon's Curios and Pawnshop.  Creon, an older Archontean man, has a shop full of random stuff.  He seems willing to buy used items.  His stock seems highly variable; he actually had a magic wand for sale the last time someone checked, but the price was high.
• Jeremias the Money Changer.  Jeremias Smallleaf, a halfling, has his main shop in the walled Upper Market.  He also has a couple of smaller stalls in the Upper Market and near the Hill of the Gods, run by his daughters Marla and Cassie.  He was willing to identify old coins for free, and charges a small fee to change coins and gems.  It appears he also loans money, but the PCs have not yet discussed the terms.
• Temple of Demma.  Ioannes is a cleric of Demma and so was able to negotiate a good donation rate for a Remove Curse spell there.  The Remove Curse was cast by Vivian, the Thorcin male chief priest of the temple; it's unclear whether any of the other four priests can cast spells that powerful.  It's not yet known what the surcharge is for non-members of the congregation without a cleric to vouch for them.  Training for clerical spells and skills is also available.
• House of the Gods.  This is a shared space for shrines of all the approved religions that don't have full temples in town.  No major services are available, besides basic religious information from lay volunteers, or possibly the occasional chance to meet a visiting cleric.
• The Yellow Cloak Inn.  This is a full-service inn, with both private rooms and shared bunkrooms, and both common and upper-class common rooms with a variety of food available.  It is run by Margot the Red, a Thorcin woman.  Her husband Bricwine is a bartender.  Rates for double-occupancy private rooms and common meals are reasonable; single-occupancy private rooms and better meals would increase the cost of living.  Margot does not allow spellcasting on the premises, because You Might Accidentally Summon a Demon.
• The Arcane Practitioners' Club.  The club is not affiliated with any of the seven official Archontean colleges.  It is run by two Archontean women, Lyssandra (the senior wizard) and Pelteon (her former apprentice).  They offer magical training, identification of magic items, and spellcasting services.  Fee-paying members of their club can also use their alchemy lab, their small library, and even rent apartments.  (The apartments aren't quite as nice as the Yellow Cloak Inn, and no maid service or food is available, but there are fewer rules.)
• The Baliff's Truncheon.  This is a dive bar down the hill from the Azure Keep, near Totey Lake.  It has a bad reputation, which means it's a good place to find trainers for less savory skills -- or possibly get robbed trying.
• Livestock and Horse Market.  On the outskirts of town (but still within its theoretical future walls) is a large building that buys and sells and stables horses, and buys and sells livestock, and also butchers livestock and sells meat.  They also sell farming and mining equipment on the side.  It is said to be run by identical twin brothers, with Sakeon handling the horses and Trucleon the livestock.
• Tasha's Tailor Shop.  Tasha, a Thorcin woman, has a high-end tailor shop in the Upper Market.  She sells various clothing and is also able to alter or repair clothes, or to sew clothing to order.  She aims at the higher end of the market; there are cheaper options in worse parts of town.
• There are fishermen by the docks on Totey Lake.  One was willing to give swimming lessons, even in early spring.  Presumably you could also learn fishing or boating or knot-tying from them, and not be quite as cold.  There are also a couple of fishmongers to sell their catch.

And here are some other locations they've heard about but not actually visited:

Temples of Mitra, Lucreon, and Heschius Ban.

Astableon the Scribe and Bookseller.  This shop, located in the Upper Market, is apparently the place to go if you need to buy or sell a book, or have someone read or write a letter for you.

The Stunned Acolyte Inn.  This is where you get a very high-quality room or meal, if you don't mind paying a lot and dressing and behaving appropriately.

The Rarities Factor, the Prosperity Factor, and the Silent Factor.  Three competing Archontean merchant factors have buildings in town.  They provide financial services such as safely holding your money for a fee, letters of credit that let you access your stored money at their other locations, and organization of merchant caravans to transport goods or letters across the Empire.  They may provide other services as well.

The Azure Keep is home to the local sept of the Knights of the Azure Shield.  Lady Alexia Basileon, the Green Lady, lives in the Residence connected to the Keep.

There are at least four Archontean government buildings in town.

The Central Market is held twice a week, on Totsday morning and all Demmasday.  Some merchants and farmers who don't have full stores operate stalls at the market.

Kaelo's Bathhouse is apparently a major social center, not just a place to get clean.

There are about 7 more taverns.  Apparently getting a drink at every inn and tavern in town on the same night is a challenge among irresponsible young people with money to spend, and the hardest part is getting into the Stunned Acolyte.

There are other craftspeople such as leatherworkers, jewelers, stonecutters, potters, weavers, furriers, a bowyer, a herbalist/apothecary, and a ropemaker.

What does this all mean in game terms?

• All standard equipment from DFRPG: Adventurers (not Special Orders or magic items or Elven/Dwarven equipment) is available at list price.  (Except plate armor, which is unknown in the Archontean Empire.)  No interaction with the GM is required here; if you want a normal knife or wheelbarrow you can just buy one.
• High quality versions of standard equipment are also available, but might require some lead time for custom construction.  So if you're in a hurry, first make an availability roll to see if what you want is available off the shelf.  And if it's not, see how long it will take to make one.
• The pawnshop buys used items, so disposing of unwanted goods (at the usual fraction of their value based on Wealth) is easy.  No interaction with the GM is required to sell most used goods.  If something is very valuable ($5000 or more), the sale should be cleared with the GM to make sure the local merchants can afford it.
• Special Orders or magical equipment might be available, but not reliably.  You're either waiting for something to show up for sale somewhere, or finding someone who can make it for you.  Again, the GM will make an availability roll, and if it fails you can try again next week, or see if someone can make your item.

What about other towns or cities?

• The only bigger town in Burdock's Valley is Newmarket, about 60 miles (three days' walk) to the south.  It's about twice as big as Gosterwick, so a bit more robust of a market, but still not exactly huge.
• The only real city in this part of Irthuin is Narsileon, the capital of the Exarchate.  Narsileon is about twenty times as big as Gosterwick and ten times as big as Newmarket, and is also a seaport with access to wider trade routes, so has much more available.  Unfortunately it's about 400 miles away, which is two to three weeks each way on foot, or a bit faster if you have horses.
• The biggest city in the Empire and the known world is the capital, Archontos, on the island of Mithruin.  It's about three times the size of Narsileon.  If you can buy something at all, you can probably buy it in Archontos.  Getting there means first travelling to Narsileon, then catching a ship and sailing 1100 miles across the Winedark Sea.  The ocean voyage should take about a week if the winds are cooperative, or potentially longer if they're not.

Dealing with Information Spells in a Megadungeon

Vael, one of the PC wizards in DFRPG: Arden Vul, started with the Seek Earth spell.  For 3 mana, Seek Earth lets you find the direction and approximate distance to the nearest significant amount of any one type of earth, metal, or stone.  It also lets you exclude known quantities of the item.  It uses the Long-Distance Modifiers, which mean no range penalty for up to 200 yards away, up to half a mile at -1, and distances beyond that hardly matter in a dungeon.  Its only prerequisite is Magery 0 or Druidic Power Investiture 1, so essentially every mage, druid, elf, or half-elf can have Seek Earth for one character point.  And every skilled specialist wizard (IQ + Magery 18 or better) gets it at skill 16 or higher for one point, so they cast it for only 2 mana, and it succeeds 98% of the time (16- on 3d6) if the correct mineral is within 200 yards.  If you're rolling against 16, 17 is just a normal failure, costing you one mana point and letting you try again.  Only an 18 is a critical failure, letting the GM lie to you about the presence or location of the item (or possibly summon a demon or whatever other fun comes up on the critical spell failure table), so only once in 216 times does casting this spell really have a chance to hurt.

This is tremendously useful for loot-hunting PCs.  You Seek Earth for gold or silver, exclude whatever your group is holding and any source you previously detected and don't currently want to mess with (example: hoard of a dragon big enough to swallow you whole), and then your GM fumbles through the adventure trying to find the next closest source.  You then make a beeline for the treasure.  If it's unguarded, free gold.  If it's guarded by mooks, you get to beat them up and take their lunch money.  If it's guarded by something scary, you have a warning so at least it's less likely to surprise you, so perhaps you see it and leave, or maybe you design a good tactical plan and apply all your buffs before you alpha strike it.

So from a player point of view, Seek Earth is yes.  But from a GM point of view, it's potentially a huge pain, especially in a large dungeon where you might have to go through a lot of rooms looking for the appropriate treasure.  How do you deal with this?

First, even though the spell says "nearest", players probably won't hold you to that.  If there's some gold 40 yards to the north, and you miss that room when scanning your map and room descriptions and instead send them to a room 70 yards east, will they notice?  Probably not; if they already knew where the gold was they wouldn't need the spell.  Will they be mad if they realize weeks later there was some closer gold and you missed it?  Probably not; it still gave them a bearing on some nearby gold.  So as long as you're not deliberately hosing your players, best effort is fine.  So if you're not prepared for this spell, I think it's totally reasonable to just look at the map, eyeball the nearby rooms in approximate order of how close they are, and then check each room description for the metal in question.  Stop at the first reasonable hit rather than spending ten minutes trying to be certain you didn't miss one.

Second, it says "significant" but doesn't define it, so you can set your own threshold and ignore anything below that if you want.  (I mean, you're the GM, you can always do whatever you want, but here you absolutely need to because the rules as written are fuzzy.)  Feel free to ignore monster pocket change and focus on bigger piles if that's more fun.  Conversely, if you don't want to have your PCs zoom past every other monster straight to the big boss's loot at the end, feel free to have it pick up the 17 closer treasures first, even if they're small.  You have options.

Third, NPCs, at least smart ones, know that spells, especially common spells, exist.  Common spells should not be automatic win buttons.  If the PCs aren't the only wizards in the game, then smart powerful rich NPCs might put their best stuff in lead-lined rooms, or orichalcum chests, or no-mana zones, whatever it takes in your setting.  It's not fair to have every single gold piece in the game hidden like that and make the spell useless, and it's kind of silly to have a chest worth way more than the treasure inside it, but the players should not be able to assume that there are never countermeasures available.

For the specific case of Arden Vul, now that I know a PC wizard is going to cast Shape Earth for gold and silver a lot (and he mentioned diamonds were another possibility, and that he might take Seek Magic soon), I'm planning to make a supplemental dungeon key with just room numbers and treasure.  Here are the rooms with gold, silver, diamonds, and magic.  If I wanted to get fancy I could make a file with the (X, Y, Z) coordinates of each room (maybe automatically extracted from the coordinates of the hidden room labels I put on the Foundry maps), and then write a little program to find the distance from a room to every other room, sort ascending, then spit out the label of the first room with the appropriate treasure (for me), and the direction and distance to it (for the player).  The code is easy; most of the work is data entry.

Is that work really necessary?  No, you can guesstimate.  If most of the time they're searching for something that's fairly common in a dungeon, you can probably just check a few nearby rooms until you find some, then stop.  And if they search for something rare, you can search the adventure PDF and find all instances of the thing they're seeking and then give them the closest.  I think it's worth automating in my case because I know this PC (and probably any other future wizards or druids in the game, if this one gets eaten) is going to cast Seek spells ten times per session and this campaign could run for years, so I'd rather do some work up front during downtime to save time during play, but it's totally up to each GM how they handle things like this.

My final tip is for players: if you want to play a PC with a power that's hard for the GM to adjudicate, give them a heads-up ahead of time.  Maybe they'll ban your favorite toy, but better to find out sooner than later.  Or maybe they'll lean into it and help you make it work, but they can do a better job of preparing for it if they know it's coming.  Treasure detection is a pretty straightforward (if data intensive) case to handle.  Divination is much worse, so warn the GM before playing a diviner, and don't get mad if they only let you tell the future once per session rather than every five minutes.  Seek MacGuffin can short-circuit a whole adventure, if the point of the adventure is finding one MacGuffin, so discuss it first.  (In some cases the GM will be thrilled you can do it, because that saves them a lot of time spraying around clues for you to maybe figure out.  In others, they might need to improve their adventure so that it's still fun even if you've made the finding part trivial.)

DFRPG Arden Vul Session 2: Halfling Rent-Seekers

Date:

Demmasday, 21st of Toternios, 2993 AEP


Weather:

Cool, cloudy


Player Characters:

Ioannes Grammatikos Byzantios, Archontean cleric of Demma (Demented Avenger)
Vael Sunshadow, Half-Elven mage (Kyle)

Uvash Edzuson, Dwarven cleric of Zodarrim (Based Cosmo)
Vallium Halcyon, Archontean fighter (Greybrown)
Thorne Lasselanta Ashcroft, Half-Elven monk (mercenary) (Archon Shiva)


Significant NPCs:

Margot the Red, innkeeper at the Yellow Cloak Inn
Bricwine, bartender at the Yellow Cloak Inn
Tasha, tailor
Creon, pawnbroker
Unidentified huge flying reptilian beast
Roskelly Winterleaf, halfling underground toll collector lieutenant
Several halfling toll collectors
12 giant rats


When the PCs returned to Gosterwick after their previous delve, Ioannes was confronted by Margot the Red, Innkeeper at the Yellow Cloak Inn, for leaving some sheets with Continual Darkness (accidentally) cast on them in his room and freaking out the maid. Margot informed Ioannes that her husband Bricwine had needed to throw those sheets into Totey Lake before the maid was willing to go back into that room, and that as a result Ioannes owed the Inn 5 silver pieces for some new bedding. And that furthermore spellcasting, even by good clerics of Demma, was not allowed on the premises because Sometimes Someone Makes a Mistake and Look a Demon, and please take that outside the town walls. Ioannes meekly agreed to pay the fee, and retained his right to use the Inn. However, both Ioannes and Vael decided that getting an apartment at the Arcane Practitioners Club made more sense than staying in an inn with such stuffy rules, even it it meant no maid service and needing to walk somewhere to get meals.

Most of the PCs spent a week in Gosterwick, training and identifying and selling loot from their previous adventure and shopping. Michael, however, got bored in town and went on a hunting trip, and was not back in time for this delve. The party managed to recruit another tough-looking fighter, Vallium, to help protect the mages and clerics. They also walked over to the Grudge Brigade Mercenary Company's "Headquarters" (a small building on the outskirts of Gosterwick). Ashe the druid was also not around this time, but a half-elven monk carrying a pike and a couple of long staves named Thorne Lasselanta Ashcroft was willing to accompany the group for a share of treasure.

This time they left a couple hours before dawn, to give themselves more time in the ruins before sunset. Vael had dragged along a wheelbarrow this time, saying it would be easier to push his pack than carry it. Once again the group made the treacherous climb up the Long Stair without anyone slipping and falling to their death. The only encounter on the way up was with some mountain goats, who just watched them curiously and did not cause trouble. When they reached the top of the climb and entered the ruins of Arden Vul between the ruined gate towers, the group had a debate about which way to explore. Suggestions included descending into the darkness of the squat tower, climbing the Pyramid of Thoth, and going west to see what was near the top of the waterfall. The waterfall seemed closest, so the group went west.

One of the ruined buildings on the way looked a bit better preserved than the rest, so the party decided to search it. About an hour of digging around in the rubble without tools generated nothing of interest, and a couple of comments that someone should bring some picks and shovels next time, or, better yet, learn some labor-saving earth magic. Continuing west, they reached the Swift River above the cliff, with a large pond or small lake to their north, a swampy area west of the river, a couple of rotting old bridges spanning the river, a dam separating the lake from the river, and the waterfall going over the cliff to the south, between two towers. They took a look at both bridges and confirmed they looked flimsy and that levitating over the river would be a much safer way to cross. Heading north to the dam, they saw a locked door on the side of it.

Nobody brought lockpicks or lock-opening magic, but the mercenary brought a huge fine quality pike, and decided to start smashing the lock with it. This took about five tries, but the ancient lock gave way. Even with the lock broken, the door was quite stuck, and required the combined efforts of three people for several minutes to open. Inside the dam building were two wheels of some sort of extremely interesting metal. Uvash didn't think it was dwarvish, but it looked to be in remarkably good shape for metal that had sat in a wet place for 1200 years. Vael immediately played with both wheels, and found that one spun freely and did nothing, and the other was very stuck and would not budge, but had ten marks on the side and seemed to currently be set around the middle. The stronger Vallium heaved mightily on the wheel and caused it to move a notch, and then the group went outside to see what that did to the dam.

While they did this, a huge flying reptile with a vicious barb on its tail flew toward the dam from the southwest, turned around high over the party, and unleashed a rather large clump of something gross from its nether regions. The improvised missile missed them and splashed into the lake nearby, and the flying beast flew away back to the west, apparently heading to the tower in the southwest corner of the ruins. The group briefly discussed what kind of beast that was and decided it was big enough to leave alone for now. They returned to the subject of the dam and decided the wheel somehow controlled the amount of water going through it, and Uvash suggested slowing the flow by one notch to see if that made the waterfall a bit less dangerous on the climb. Several minutes of exertion later the wheel was in that position. Vael decided to cast Seek Earth, looking for gold and silver. The spells both pointed southwest, the same direction the flying beast with the stinger had gone. The group decided today was not a good day to try to fight a huge flying reptile and take its treasure. They instead walked south to the top of the waterfall.

The guard tower flanking the east side of the waterfall was mostly fallen down, with only the ground floor intact. Remembering how Michael almost got ambushed by spiders last time, the group very cautiously examined the outside of the tower for a few minutes before Vallium peeked his head in, but they did not spot anything of interest this time. The group looked at the waterfall from the top for a bit, then decided to head back toward the Pyramid of Thoth.

After walking for several minutes, they reached the pyramid without encountering any surprises. Once again they said the four pictures of Thoth in various poses on the first four steps, and that the pictures repeated on the higher steps. After a bit of discussion of the pictures the group climbed to the top of the pyramid. There stood a 20' tall statue of Thoth in Ibis-headed form, with a body of purple porphyry stone and a head of white marble, with eyes of green jade. Curiously, while the body of the statue was massive, the arms looked relatively light and appeared to be mounted on pins so that they could rotate up and down. The pyramid was surrounded by purple porphyry columns, holding up a relatively small roof that protected the pyramid from the elements. Finally, one rectangular section of floor was a different color from the rest, and seemed to have a seam around it indicating that it might be able to move, but it sat flush and there were no handles visible so there was no obvious way to open it.

Taking a clue from the statue's spindly arms and the pictures on the lowest step, the group decided to move both arms forward. Sure enough, the door in the floor slid open, revealing some stairs heading down into the pyramid. There was a large handle on the bottom side of the door, showing it might be possible to slide it open from inside. The party tested that handle and confirmed they could indeed move the door using it, then headed down the steps into the pyramid.

After a long descent they saw a small landing where the stairs reversed to continue down in the other direction. All the original plaster on the walls was destroyed, and the bare walls were covered with graffiti in a variety of languages. Ioannes pointed out some graffiti in modern Archontean (surprising some) saying "I told Robin not to touch the eyes. Now his picks are mine." This seemed to confirm Uvash's earlier advice not to steal gem eyes from religious states because their gods don't like that.

After briefly discussing the graffiti, they continued down the next staircase until it emerged into larger landing room, this one with the remains of a fire pit, and lit by orange Continual Light cast on the ceiling. Why the Continual Light was orange, they were not sure. They searched the fire pit and just found some charcoal and bones, nothing interesting.

Continuing down the next flight of stairs, they descended hundreds of feet until the stairs ended in a large room, partially lit by torches in wall sconces, and containing another statue of Thoth. This one was 15' tall, with an open stone offering chest at its feet and movable arms like the statue on top of the pyramid. Glancing around the room for other items of interest, they found a recently dead human corpse against the west wall, with no armor or weapons but still wearing clothing. As they discussed the newly found statue and body, the group was interrupted by some high-pitched talk in Archontean. It was an armed and armored halfling, backed up by five more, walking toward them.

The lead halfling was named Roskelly, and he informed the party that this area under the pyramid was the turf of his boss, Phlebotomas Plumthorn, and that Mr. Plumthorn generously allowed visitors to their territory as long as they purchased an Adventuring License for $25, and also paid a tithe of 10% of any treasure recovered in the Halls. A conversation proceeded, where the PCs tried to figure out whether it was only these 6 halflings or whether they had backup, while the halflings tried to see if the PCs had the money, and whether they would pay, flee back up the stairs, or fight. The PCs told Roskelly they needed to go back up the steps a bit to confer in private, and return with their decision. After a prolonged discussion about whether to fight today or later when they knew more about their opposition, they reluctantly agreed to pay the toll, and handed Roskelly $125 in gold and silver coins. This caused Roskelly and his gang to relax noticably, and they issued five small bronze tokens that they said were the Adventuring Licenses and would allow re-entry. The pointed at the various exits from the room and indicated that the portcullis to the east was the halflings' territory and visitors weren't welcome that way, but they were free to explore anywhere else they wanted, and just to call out before they left to facilitate the smooth and businesslike paying of their tithe. The halflings then withdrew a bit toward their territory and left the party to figure out where to explore.

There was a body to search, another statue to check out, and a large room with a total of nine exits, or seven if they excluded the stairs they'd just come down and the halflings' territory. Vael searched the body, and found that while it had no weapons or armor or coins, there was a scroll in its pants pocket. He scanned the scroll, was happy to see that it appeared to be a spell scroll in Mithric, but then was disappointed that it was a cleric scroll rather than a mage scroll that he could use. It was See Secrets, useful for finding traps and secret doors, and it was a powered scroll that a cleric could use without burning their own mana. Vael handed the scroll to Ioannes.

The group briefly discussed doing something with the statue, then decided to go through the easternmost door on the north wall. It was unlocked, and some small footprints in the dust revealed that the halflings had probably gone that way before. A bit disappointed that the area had probably already been plundered, the party proceeded, hoping to reach fresh territory with loot. They opened another door, went down a narrow passage north, and found a larger room, lit with orange Continual Light like they had seen on the stairway landing. The walls were lined with sixteen pictures of ibis heads all looking at the same point in the center of the floor, but there was nothing interesting at that point. There were bronze double doors leading north, along with a couple of peepholes in the north wall, and a single wooden door to the west. The double doors were locked. The peepholes lead to a dark room. Vael shoved his Continual Light rock through a peephole to reveal a big empty dusty room with walls painted green. With the doors leading north locked and very strong looking, the group went west through the unlocked wooden door. This led to a bare stone passage, then another door leading to a corridor full of trash and with doors leaving in four directions. Using the maxim of "left for loot" they turned left to the south, went down another stone corridor, can emerged into another small room. This one had a rotted old pouch in one corner, which Ioannes searched. It contained a single silver coin and a small gem. "Left for loot" had worked again, though it wasn't a lot of loot.

There was another door on the south end of the room, and Vael predicted from his map that it would lead back into the room with the statue of Thoth, where the halflings had extracted the admission fees. It indeed did. The halflings came to check out the light and noise, saw it was repeat customers, and went back to their portcullis. This time the group decided to play with the statue. Ioannes put the coin he'd just found into the offering chest, but nothing happened. Vallium suggested adding the scroll they'd just found, but again nothing happened.

There were plenty of places left to check: five unknown exits from this room, two unexplored wooden doors back northwest, and the locked bronze doors to the northeast. They went northwest, and opened the left door. Beyond it was a big oval room, with four pillars helping to hold up the roof, each of them carved with the image of a different god. The two clerics conferred and pooled their theological knowledge and announced that three of the statues were Osiris, Wadjet, and Maat. The three non-clerics showed off the depth of their own theological knowledge by explaining that the fourth one with the ibis head was Thoth. There was an archway to the north with bright orange light coming through it, a dark archway to the west, and a passage heading south to a door. Vael said something about loot being more likely in dark places and also left for loot, so they went south.

This led to an intersection of wide hallways leading south and west, surrounded by looted empty burial niches along the walls. Far ahead to the south was another statue of Thoth, so the group went that way. This statue featured Thoth seated with a book in his lap and a pen in his hand. Again the arms could be moved. A passage to the east led back to the halfling area. After much discussion about the pictures on the stairs, Vael started playing with the arms. Pointing the left arm forward produced a click to the east that two of them heard, so the group went east to the room with the halflings, didn't see what clicked, and went back west. Vael also pointed the right arm forward, and then a pit opened up in front of the statue, where a couple of his friends had been standing a few minutes before. Nobody was standing there now, so nobody fell in. Vael, having lost his own Continual Light rock, called his friends who had light over to help look in the hole. Rather than a vertical pit, it was a chute, sloping down and east, and continuing past the range of the light. After a quick agreement not to go down right now, Vael resumed playing with the statue's arms. Resetting the arms to pointing down closed the lid to the chute with a thunk. Pointing both arms straight up reopened the chute and also 10' deep pits north and south of the statue, with spikes. Fortunately nobody was standing on either when they opened up.

Done opening pits for the monent, the group proceeded south to a closed door, then through the door to an east-west hallway full of an ugly greenish-gray mist. The mist didn't seem harmful. As they entered, an illusory mouth appeared on the opposite wall, said a few sentences in a language none of them understood, and disappeared. They thought they heard the word "Thoth", but otherwise it was gibberish. They proceed west and entered a large room containing a pyramid, this one triangular rather than square. Much smaller than the Pyramid of Thoth high above them, but pretty big for an indoor pyramid, tall enough that they couldn't see the top with their bright Continual Light stones. They discussed climbing it, but then Vael announced that they needed to head back to town soon and had hardly found any loot, so he should try another Seek Earth to see if there was any gold or silver nearby. After much agreement, he cast both spells, and thought he detected both gold and silver to the north. So they went east out of the pyramid room, back north to the hallway with looted burial niches, then turned west into another hallway, sloping down, of looted burial niches, where the spell seemed to point.

The group could have been surprised by giant rats jumping ouf of the niches to ambush them, but they were not. It was about a dozen rats, and they were actually slightly bigger than the halflings, if less heavily armed and armored. The loot apparently already had an owner. The rats charged toward the party. Vallium quickly killed one with his sword. Vael cast Grease on the floor under all the rats, causing much slipping and falling. While the rats were delayed, the rest of the group formed up to fight. Lasselanta stood ready to parry with her staves, and when the rats tried to bite her friends she aggressively knocked them back to slide across the magically slippery floor back to their nest. Meanwhile both clerics tried to get a couple of blows, but not very effectively, and Uvash actually dropped his mace. Vael walked up to prepare more spells, while Vallium killed several rats. Eventually Lasselanta thought the density of rats was low enough for her to go on the offensive as well, and started initiating attacks on the rats rather than waiting for them to attack and aggressively parrying. After a few seconds, there were about a dozen dead giant rats on the floor. The party was fortunately unwounded, as nobody knew what kind of diseases rats that size might carry, but probably nothing good.

There was a huge rats' nest in the corner where two niche-filled hallways connected. Vael quickly ran up to the next for loot, saw a rather ornate torch that look magic, and grabbed it. It was indeed magic, but as he grabbed it, the area around him went completely dark. Vael, holding the torch, couldn't see anything near him, but could see light outside the area. His friends nearby couldn't see anything. Vael tried throwing the torch away, but it clung to his hand. Oops. After some discussion, Vael retreated from his friends to let them see, while the rest of them searched the nest. The remaining treasure was all mundane shiny stuff: some gold and silver coins, several gems, a pearl, and a gold ring with a lapis inset. Depending on what the gems were worth, probably enough to make this delve worthwhile, even after the expense of paying off the halflings and presumably needing to donate to a temple to detach that cursed torch from Vael.

Taking advantage of the magical darkness, the group put all the gems on Vael where they were impossible to see and had Ioannes just carry the small number of coins they'd found. Most of the halflings found the story of the cursed torch amusing. But Roskelly wasn't sure he believed it, and had a couple of his thugs go into the darkness and try to separate Vael from the torch, which failed, and while the halflings were distracted by the torch and the darkness they failed to pat down Vael for the gems. Ioannes obediently paid $5 out of the $46 in coins they'd found.

The group headed back to Gosterwick. Vael had to stay about six yards away from his friends to let them see. It would have been a dangerous climb down the Long Stair for Vael, since he would be unable to see where he was stepping, but fortunately he had Levitation, so the cloud of darkness just floated down the side of the mountain while everyone else had to hike. There were no dangerous encounters on the way back, and, owing to their early morning start, they made it back to town right around sunset.


GM's Comments:

Another successful week. The PCs didn't pick up nearly as much loot as last time, but it was enough to pay their expenses for a week. They broke into an ancient dam and think they figured out how to manipulate the water level, which may be useful at some point. They saw a terrifyingly huge and rather rude flying reptile high above them, and decided not to go after the hoard that Seek Earth indicated it might be guarding. They figured out how to manipulate the statue to get into the Pyramid of Thoth, paid off some rent-seeking halflings, and found two more statues of Thoth, another pyramid, and a group of angry giant rats with some minor treasure. Finally, they found another amusingly cursed item, and this time found out about the curse the hard way.

The group was lucky not to be standing above any of the three pits they opened when playing with the seated statue. Two PCs had previously been standing atop the lid of the chute to the east, but when some playing with the statue's arms had produced a click to the east, everyone had walked that way to look for the source, and when they came back they didn't stand in the same place. The pits to the north and south looked like pretty simple traps: fall ten feet, land on spikes, bleed. Not fun at all, but probably not lethal for a tough PC with a friendly cleric or two nearby to patch them up. The one with a sloping chute leading down into the darkness, though, nobody could be sure about. Maybe it led to a soft landing and a pile of treasure; maybe it led to molten lava. One way to find out...

As with the spiders last week, the rats failing to surprise the party despite pretty good odds heavily influenced the combat. The group had two strong warriors to kill the rats and parry their bites, Vael's Grease spell to slow down the flow of rat attacks to a level the warriors could more easily handle, and the clerics to help distract the rats from dogpiling the warriors. Uvash missed a rat badly enough to accidentally throw his mace three hexes, demonstrating why four out of five warriors recommend a one-silver-piece lanyard for their friends who critically fail attack rolls. Fortunately the rats were mostly dead by that point so it didn't matter too much.


Achievements:

The statue of Thoth right under the pyramid (the one with the stone collection box, not the one with the book that opens pits when you play with the arms) is the Glory of Thoth, an Arden Vul Iconic Location. This group all got 1 XP for finding it, even though they hadn't heard of it before.


XP:

They haven't identified all the gems or the ring yet, or paid for the Remove Curse on that torch, but this delve will clearly end up in the 1 XP for loot range: enough to pay the bills but not enough to qualify as a great haul. The group explored about 20 new locations, which falls into the 1 XP for exploration range. And the Achievement was 1 XP. So everyone earned 3 XP, a solid week, especially when you consider they were in the red until the very end of the session.


Next week:

Presumably Vael needs a Remove Curse for that torch. The group has some gems and a ring to identify, and then they'll probably head back to the ruins. Possible points of interest include that giant rude flying reptile with the scary tail and possible loot to the southwest, the dam above the waterfall, the square tower they haven't entered yet, the unexplored majority of the ruins, or going back under the Pyramid of Thoth. Under the Pyramid they've got the triangular mini-pyramid to explore, some halflings they've vaguely discussed fighting to take their money back, and a whole bunch of unexplored ways to go.

DFRPG Arden Vul Session 1: First Visit to the Ruins of Arden Vul

Date:

Demmasday, 14th of Toternios, 2993 AEP

Weather:

Unseasonably warm, sunny

Player Characters:

Ioannes Grammatikos Byzantios, Archontean cleric of Demma (Demented Avenger)
Michael J Dundee, Thorcin barbarian (Adam)

Vael Sunshadow, Half-Elven mage (Kyle)

Uvash Edzuson, Dwarven cleric of Zodarrim (Based Cosmo)

Ashe Maykum, Imperial Goblin druid (mercenary) (Archon Shiva)

Significant NPCs:

6 Knights of the Azure Shield

6 Huge Spiders

Ashe's summoned goats, bat swarms, and rat swarms

The PCs all came to Gosterwick from various places around the world of Magae, to explore the ruined city of Arden Vul.  Each had decided to look for comrades rather than entering the ruins alone.  Each failed to sign on with an experienced adventuring company, and they decided to form their own informal band, agreeing to watch each other's backs, make decisions together, and split treasure evenly.  The four hired Ashe, a druid from the Grudge Brigade, to come along on this mission, for an equal share of treasure.

They decided to leave Gosterwick at dawn on Demmasday the 14th of Torernios.  Late winter in the northern hemisphere, but it was an unseasonably nice day.  The night before, Vael and Ioannes had cast several bright Continual Light spells, so light would not be an issue if they entered dark places.  (Ioannes critically failed once and accidentally cast Continual Darkness on the bedding in his room at the Yellow Creek Inn instead, oops, hopefully it'll wash out.)  The group walked east out the Water Gate, the only one of Gosterwick's three gates that actually had completed walls around it.  Following directions from several locals, they took a dirty preference path east from the city to the old Imperial Road, once cobblestone now dirt with stone bumps.  The road turned north, crossed the Swift River at a bridge, and continued north.  About halfway into the ten-mile hike, the party was overtaken by a group of six mounted Knights of the Azure Shield, the force aligned with the ruler of Gosterwick, Lady Alexia.  The group made way for the knights, who proceeded down the road without stopping for discussion.  The group continued hiking until they could see the cliff face, featuring a huge waterfall, the twin colossal statues of the ancient heroes Arden and Vul, and the Long Stair.  The ruined city of Arden Vul was known to be at the top of that cliff.  The group reached the base of the cliff around noon.  The sound of the waterfall was deafening as they approached.  Ashe wanted to use Shape Water to concoct some kind of elevator, but to enter that waterfall or its plunge pool without much stronger magic would be certain death.  Vael thought the statue of Arden (which was remarkably intact for something that had been in the path of a waterfall for a millennium) was magical, while the statue of Vul (that was missing an arm and most of a leg despite being much farther from the water) was not.

After a bit of discussion that nobody could hear because of the crashing water, Ashe and his summoned goats started walking up the Long Stair, and the others followed.  The path was treacherous in places, but nobody slipped.  About halfway up, they found a room tunneled into the rock next to the Stair, its door ripped away.  It was a small bare room, empty except for a fire pit and some firewood.  Ioannes suggested a search and the others joined in, but found nothing of interest.

The party continued up the Long Stair to the next switchback, and found another room in the rock, this one larger and containing a lot of debris and some large spiderwebs.  Ioannes and Vael suggested burning them, and Vael used Create Fire to burn the webs away.  This was quite effective but filled the room with noxious smoke.  Rather than waiting for it to clear, Vael cast Purify Air, and rolled a critical success.  The smoke instantly cleared.  Beyond the burned webs was the skeleton of a long-dead dwarven warrior, wearing mail armor and red leather boots, and carrying a potion bottle filled with sparkling blue powder.  Vael thought the boots and powder looked magical and grabbed them.  Uvash decided not to take the dwarf-sized mail, so the group left the heavy mail and the dwarf's warhammer to possibly take on the trip back down.

After spending a bit of time searching the room, the group resumed their hike, and eventually reached the top.  Ahead of them was the front gatehouse of Arden Vul, consisting of two round towers, with the gate that formerly sat between them completely gone.  The left tower was fairly intact, while the right tower was half collapsed.  Ruined walls continued from the gatehouse in both directions.  The group decided to search the towers.  Considering which to check first, one said "left for loot!" but rather than trusting that maxim, Vael cast Seek Earth, looking for gold.  Amazingly, he detected some gold just a few yards to the northwest, meaning it was in the west tower.  Left for loot confirmed.  The tower, while mostly intact, had some gaps in the walls through which entry was possible.  Michael stuck his head in and started to enter, but then saw several dozen eyes looking at him.  There were six huge spiders in the tower waiting to ambush him, and if they had achieved surprise he would have been in very big trouble, but they did not and he popped back out.

With full knowledge of the spiders inside, the group formed up outside the hole, while Ashe sent some disposable summoned rat and bat swarms into the tower to engage the spiders.  While the swarms were engaging some spiders, and Ioannes was casting Flaming Weapon on Michael's longsword, Vael bravely approached the hole and entended his staff inside to cast Create Fire inside the tower.  That was a tactical mistake, as it put the vulnerable wizard in the front as two spiders emerged from the hole, deciding that their tower full of swarms and fire was no longer so cozy.  One spider attempted a Move and Attack on Vael and rolled a hit.  Vael dropped his backpack to reduce his encumbrance level (generously allowed by the GM this time, but maybe not in the future), used a Retreating Dodge, and evaded the spider.  Another spider missed.

While the swarms inside the tower continued to terrorize and spiders and distract them from the PCs, the two spiders outside the tower fought Michael, Uvash, and Vael.  Michael landed a killing blow on one spider, and then a killing critical hit on the other.  Uvash got a good swing in with his mace, but barely missed.  By the time the party entered the tower, they saw one dead spider, killed by a swarm.  The other three spiders had fled.

Remembering there was gold in the tower, Uvash entered and found a sack containing a bunch of oversized ancient gold coins.  Nobody was sure of their exact value, but large plus gold was a good sign.  The group searched the rest of the tower and found nothing of interest.  They then moved to the other half-collapsed tower and saw nothing but a chance to dig in rubble without digging tools.  Ioannes poked around for a bit, but then the group moved on.

The most promising direction was north into the ruined city, since there was a road that way, leading to an obelisk, then a large forum featuring an intact tower, a huge oak tree, and a ruined building.  Further north was a pyramid.  The group first checked out the obelisk, which had a bunch of writing in Mithric (the language of the old empire) listing the gods of the old pantheon and a list of old emperors.  There was also an ankh-shaped recess and some writing about a Beacon.  The top section of the obelisk was full of iconography related to the sun.  They noted the writing and continued north to the forum.

There was a huge oak tree, which Ashe estimated was hundreds of years old, oddly placed in the middle of the forum.  The group was more interested in a mostly intact 40' square and 45' tall tower on the east side of the forum.  The tower's huge bronze double doors appeared magical and had keyholes, and the group decided not to play with them in case of traps.  There were no other visible entrances at low level, but there were some large windows on the top level of the tower, with no glass preventing entry.

Vael dropped his backpack, cast Levitation, and flew up to look in the windows.  He saw a room with a large statue of an 8' tall ibis head in the center, and three relatively recent corpses on the floor, two humans in scale armor with shortswords and one halfling in leather armor that Vael's magery detected as magical.  That was too much loot to ignore, so Vael flew back down to tell the others, then everyone dropped some gear to lighten the load so Vael could cast Levitation on everyone.  Michael was heavy enough that Vael couldn't maintain it on him for long, but he managed to get everyone up into the top floor of the tower.

In addition to the ibis head statue and the corpses, the top floor also featured a couple of wooden stairways down, but only the first few feet of each stairway was visible before things got dark with a suspiciously sharp cutoff.  Also, the wood looked quite rotten, so the stairs might not be safe to descend.  The group ignored the stairs for a bit and searched the room.  They found the magical halfling-sized leather armor, two sets of scale armor, two shortswords, a bandoleer of seven throwing daggers, two scroll cases, and a small golden ornament of a man's head.  They threw all the armor off the tower so they wouldn't have to deal with its weight while Levitating down, took the swords and the bandoleer (but not the daggers), then read the scrolls.  One was a wizard scroll that Vael discerned allowed cursing an item.  The other was a letter from the Archon of Arden Vul to a Thothian high priest, apparently written during the fall of Arden Vul during the civil war 1200 years ago.  They weren't sure about all the details but took the scroll.

Next they closely examined the statue.  It was amazingly constructed of precious materials like silver and ivory, but was somehow still intact.  It also detected as magical.  Uvash warned against damaging it, as it might be a holy item. Vael couldn't resist touching it, and he managed to make it rotate a bit on its vertical axis.  With some help from the stronger Michael, they saw that they could spin the statue all the way around, but nothing happened when they did this.

Finally they investigated the suspiciously dark staircase.  Uvash cast Detect Magic and found that the darkness was magical.  Ashe suspected the darkness probably hid a no mana zone so that anyone Levitating down through it would fall to their death.  The stairs also looked dangerously flimsy.  The combination of the eroded stairs and the magical darkness led the group to decide that exploring the rest of the tower could wait for another day.  For now they would gather their loot and Levitate back down.

Everyone rested at the base of the tower to recover from all the spellcasting, then the group continued north.  They briefly looked at a couple of ruined buildings but didn't investigate in detail.  Due north was a step pyramid, about 90' square and 45' high, the largest intact structure they had seen in the city.  Vael decided to do a lap around the base of the pyramid seeing what was around, while Ioannes looked closely at some artwork on the pyramid's steps.  The first four steps had four different pictures, which then started repeating on the next few steps.  The first was an ibis-headed Thoth pointing both arms at a human descending stairs.  The second was ibis-headed Thoth pointing his left arm at a human, who was bowing while presenting a plate of coins and scrolls.  The third was ibis-headed Thoth puking out a long scroll with abstract writing (no actual words) into the hands of some humans.  The fourth was a baboon seated with a book on its thighs, holding a pen, and gazing at some humans while a feather appeared in the air.  Identifying the baboon as another symbol of Thoth was easy, but naming the feather as the symbol of Thoth's wife Maat required a really good Theology roll by Uvash.  The group decided not to actually ascend the pyramid on this first trip into the ruins.

Meanwhile, Vael had discovered an interesting well to the east of the pyramid.  It was uncovered, about 5' wide, and the insides were covered with mirrors, such that the sun overhead produced blinding reflections that made it hard to see down the well.  Vael couldn't resist dropping a Continual Light rock into the well.  It fell for several seconds, then stopped at the bottom.  It was still making light down there, but the reflections were too blinding to make out any detail.  There were no rungs in the well so the only way down would be Levitation or a long rope.  Vael decided today was not the day to explore the well.

The group decided they had enough loot for their first trip into the ruined city, and headed back for home.  They stopped at the room halfway down the Long Stair and recovered the dwarf-sized mail armor and warhammer they had left there before.  They made it to the bottom with nobody slipping, and then they made it back to Gosterwick without any dangerous encounters.

GM's Comments:

Overall, the group's first trip was a success.  Nobody died or even got hurt.  They made it to the ruins of Arden Vul and back.  They explored a couple of rooms off the Long Stair, a couple of gatehouse towers, and the top floor of the large square tower.  They found the Pyramid of Thoth and the well full of mirrors.  They also found some interesting lore, like the pictures on the pyramid steps, the scroll in the square tower, and the writing on the obelisk.  They found a few things other than portable loot that seemed magic: the colossal statue of Arden, the double doors of the square tower, and the darkness in the stairs of the square tower.  Finally, they scored quite a bit of loot: some big ancient gold coins from the spider tower, some magic boots and weird magic powder and dwarf-sized mail and warhammer from the room off the Long Stair where they burned the webs, and some scale armor and shortswords and halfling-sized magic armor and a spell scroll from the corpses on the top floor of the square tower.

The combat appeared to go smoothly: Michael stuck his head in and found the spiders, then Ashe sent his bat and rat swarms into the tower to kill and distract spiders, and Michael killed the only two spiders that came out of the tower to engage the PCs.  It was actually a closer fight than it looked though.  If Michael had been surprised and attacked by all six spiders, he likely would have died.  With less warning, Ashe's swarms might not have had time to engage the spiders before the spiders bit more PCs.  And of course Michael was the PC who killed two spiders, so if he'd gone down fast that damage would not have happened.  And the spiders were faster than most of the PCs, so running away would not necessarily have been easy.  Sometimes the line between winning without a scratch and a total party kill isn't that big.  Michael's Vision beating the spiders' Stealth was really critical.

Having two clerics means this group doesn't miss Theology rolls to know stuff about religions very often, and most of the party reads Mithric, so the PCs are pretty good at engaging with lore.  Whether the players know what's going on with any of the lore is another question, but it's the first session; they've got plenty of time to piece things together.

The worst part of the session for me was tech issues.  I've used Foundry before but it's been a while, and trying to remember all the exact places to click to fix broken token vision or run a combat is not fun when you've got five live players to deal with.  I did a bunch of map testing with a test token and a non-GM login to test my walls and lights, since sometimes having GM permissions doesn't make it clear that something is broken for regular players, but I forgot to run a full combat to refresh myself on all the battle stuff, so there was some fumbling.  Fortunately these type of issues go away quickly when you use Foundry every week.

What was different in this session because we used DFRPG rather than a version of D&D like Arden Vul was written for?  I'd say the biggest difference was our new PCs had some spells that starting D&D characters would not, and the ability to cast them often rather than once per day if you happened to memorize that spell.  Light was just not an issue with ample Continual Light available, though most of the session was in lit areas so it wasn't a huge deal this time.  (And in D&D Continual Light is only a second level spell and is permanent so any character with a bit of cash should be able to get an NPC to cast it for them.)  Vael's ability to spam Levitation (he has it at 15 so he can levitate people under 160 lbs. pretty cheaply, and even heavier people aren't super expensive if he only needs them to fly for a minute) made getting everyone up to the top of the square tower easy, though this particular use case could be duplicated by one climbing thief in D&D and some rope to help the rest of the party up, or even (with a suitably generous rule set or GM) a rope and grappling hook and the whole party climbing the tower Batman-style.  Another biggie was Ashe's ability to spam Create Animal at the start of the adventure and bring along a bunch of goats and rat and bat swarms; the goats didn't do much except help carry loot home but the swarms took out most of the huge spiders.  Differences in the other direction is that armor is a lot more expensive in DFRPG than in D&D, so these starting characters didn't have much of it.  Though of course they just found some armor and some money, so some of them might be a bit harder to damage next time.  Finally, GURPS has skills for a lot of stuff that old versions of D&D didn't, so things like making Theology rolls for all the ancient religious lore was straightforward.  (D&D added a bunch of skills in 3E so modern D&D is a bit like GURPS there, but AD&D didn't have them yet.)  Since this setting says Mithric is the language of magic, I just told my players that everyone uses Mithric for spellbooks and scrolls and told the spellcasters that if they wanted to be able to read scrolls they should learn Mithric, so they took Mithric, so basically the language that substituted for Read Magic also made reading the Mithric lore easy.

Achievements:

Second Class Citizen: Ashe was the first to play an Imperial Goblin.

Iconic Location: Pyramid of Thoth: The whole party got this achievement for being the first to find the Pyramid of Thoth.

XP:

They haven't identified everything yet, or decided what to keep and what to sell, but 45 gold solidi is worth about 450 modern Archontean gold pieces (they're ten times as heavy), which is $4500.  (All the coin values are house ruled in this game rather than DFRPG stock: basically $1 is a silver piece, and we use AD&D ratios for the other coins.  So a regular gold piece is $10 and these huge ancient gold pieces are $100.)  Divided 5 ways, that's $900 each from just the gold, which puts them well into profitable territory.  Nobody used any consumables other than a day of rations, so as 125-point PCs they only need $156 each (living expenses for a week plus 3 rations) to get their first loot XP.  They need $1560 each (ten times that threshold) to get their second loot XP, and we'll know if they hit it after they identify their treasure and decide what to sell and do the sales math.  Normally PCs in games that lack well-stocked magic item stores avoid selling any magic items because they might want them later, but in this game they might sacrifice items with no immediate use or obvious later importance if it gets them loot XP.  We'll see.

For exploration, the first XP is achievable by visiting at least 5 new areas, and at first glance I think they visted 11.  They didn't visit enough new areas to get the second exploration XP, but they did find the Pyramid of Thoth, which is an Iconic Location, which generated an Achievement for everyone, worth a bonus XP.  So this session was worth at least 3 total XP per player, maybe 4 depending on loot.

Finally, Ashe got the "Second Class Citizen" achievement for being the first to play an Imperial Goblin.  (It's not a bad template, but it's not an obvious choice either.)

Next week:

Presumably the four non-mercenary PCs stick together after their first successful visit to the ruins.  Will they name their party or continue being an anonymous gaggle?  They are expected to bring another permanent PC into the group next week.  Will they go back to the square tower and brave the big bronze doors or the dangerous staircase into magical darkness, climb to the top of the Pyramid of Thoth, go down that mirrored well, or explore more of the surface ruins?  Read next week's recap to find out.

Things I Want to Do Differently This Time Around

I've been running RPGs for decades, so I have Habits and Tendencies and Opinions.  To some extent GMs attract and keep players who like the games they run, so there is some consensus in long-running groups, but it might not be complete.  So I think it's important for GMs to both get feedback from players, and to analyze their games and think about what they can improve.

This is particularly important for DFRPG Arden Vul because it contains several players from the DF Whiterock campaign, that I stopped running after 2+ years and one of the players later picked up and finished.  Since I know that one lasted a long time but eventually fell apart, how do I avoid quitting or losing players this time around?

My first goal for improvement is to keep rules consistent throughout the campaign.  I made two rule changes in DFW that players didn't like.  I thought both made sense at the time, but I was wrong on at least one of them, and not clear enough for the reasons on either.

One was limiting players to 3 attacks per turn no matter what was on their sheet, for a combination of game balance and speed of play.  It's not fun when one player's turn takes too long, but that's better handled with an explicit turn time limit rather than indirectly with an attack limit.  And it's not fun when the PCs get too powerful and wipe out enemies too easily, but that's fixable by adding more or better enemies.  So for Arden Vul I'm removing the attack limit, but might impose a time limit if combat length becomes a big problem, or some players' turns take too long.  (But not at the start, because we don't know if we actually have a problem yet, and also because some players are new to GURPS or Foundry and deserve a grace period to learn before being forced to play faster.)

The other was slowing down the rate at which character points were awarded.  I never promised any particular number of XP, but players got used to me lazily handing everyone 4 points per 4-hour session, regardless of accomplishments, with maybe some bonus points on top if they did something special.  When I saw that PC power was growing a bit faster than I wanted, I first stopped handing out bonus points, which nobody complained about because they were pretty rare anyway.  Then I slowed the regular reward from 4 to 3 for PCs over a certain point level, which caused minor grumbling.  When I slowed it from 3 to 2 at a higher point level, it caused a revolt.  Even if I never promised anyone 4 XP per session, it became expected, and changing the behavior from the expected caused problems.  Relevant xkcd.

So this time around I'm going to make it clear that PCs get 0 to 2 XP per session for loot (with 1 being pretty easy to achieve and 2 being hard, and the required threshold going up over time with PC point level, but the exact table of loot thresholds not (yet?) public), 0 to 2 for exploration (again 1 being pretty easy and 2 being harder, but the exact amount of exploration required not (yet?) public), and then again the possibility of bonus points for achievements (which I'd like to make more common this time, but small).  So with more variability in reward and more explanation for how the awards are given, I'm hoping that if players want more XP, they try to make their PCs achieve more per session, rather than whining about the GM.  I'm envisioning players figuring out the thresholds to get 1 loot XP and 1 exploration XP every session and always aiming to hit those, then going for either big loot or big exploration for a third XP (with loot being easier if you know where some loot is and think you can beat whatever might be guarding it, and exploration being easier if you know where some unexplored territory is), and then looking for things that might get them bonus XP.

My second goal is to actually finish the megadungeon.  That's a tough one because it's huge, but I think it's achievable if players are oriented toward accomplishing large goals (rather than enjoying killing wandering monsters and searching for every last copper piece), though I suspect there will be some turnover of PCs and possibly players along the way.  Ultimately it's up to the players what they do, though; the GM provides challenges and incentives and hooks but the players act.

My third goal is to play fair in both directions.  Players deserve consistent rules and rulings and to be allowed to use all the fun ideas they have and the cool stuff on their character sheets, but NPCs deserve a chance to win too, and if one of them rolls a massive critical hit against a PC who's out of Luck and Bless, no mercy.  I'm going to set the scene and then let the dice decide.  My one grudging concession to real life on that one is that I sometimes skip wandering monster rolls near the end of a session, if that would force pausing a probably-meaningless fight across sessions and deny PCs access to town, because of an arbitrary real-world time limit.  What I should do in that case, now that I think of it, is make the roll anyway but hit them with the wandering monster early next session instead of late this session, satisfying both the players' need to stop at the agreed time and the wandering monster's need to get a fair shot at eating a delicious PC.

My fourth goal is to have an entertaining GURPS recap blog with a few hundred loyal readers, which requires good source material (Arden Vul is awesome), the players doing fun stuff (I'm sure they will), and consistency.  Because this will be a voice game, I won't have complete logs to refresh my memory, so I'll try to write the recaps every Saturday morning before I forget too much.

My fifth and final goal is to listen to my players better.  A GM can't do everything players ask for because a lot of what they ask for is "let us win more" and if you always do that the game becomes a cakewalk and actually becomes less fun for most players.  But you can bend their requests in a way that gives them some of what they want while preserving some game balance.  For example, one request I got from a couple of players last time was "if a PC dies my next PC should get all the points my old PC had," which would remove all penalty for death (except the time to make a new PC) and takes a lot of tension out of the game.  But starting new PCs all the way back at 125 points might be too harsh the other way, if it causes players to play too cautiously.  So I've announced I'm going to award new PCs a fraction of their players' previous dead characters' earned XP, with the exact fraction not (yet?) public.  If this rule actually gets exercised multiple times then I need to be consistent, so the players will eventually figure out the formula, but I don't need to tell them yet.  Another one is "yes, but".  I need to be open to more weird player ideas unless they're actually a threat to the game, rather than just a challenge to my expectations.  One player wanted to play a rotating stable of hirelings rather than one consistent PC, so I'm letting him do that.  Another player wanted a weird backstory that didn't really fit the setting, but that's fine, Irthuin is a big continent, he's from a remote spot on the map that isn't detailed in the setting, and if any details about that spot become important I'll ask him.

Finally, no plan survives contact with the enemy.  Any plan for a perfect campaign goes out the window as soon as you add the chaos of actual players, and GMs need to forgive themselves and their players for mistakes made in good faith and just try to keep things going and keep them fun as best they can.  The main GM response to most setbacks should be "Noted, we'll fix that next time, next game scheduled for next week."

First game Friday night, half of the PCs done and the other half mostly done, I've got this huge megadungeon about 1/3 prepped and I'm pretty sure they won't be able to reach the other 2/3 in the first session, let's go.

Review: Feats of Exploration

Feats of Exploration is a short (15 pages), cheap ($3 on DriveThruRPG) PDF describing a way to give experience points to PCs in D&D-like games for stuff besides defeating monsters and finding treasure.  Most players are at least somewhat motivated by XP, so if you want them to do things besides killing and looting, giving them incentives to do other things seems like a good idea.  On the other hand, giving them more ways to get XP without removing the existing ways means your players will earn more total XP, which can be good or bad depending on whether you want them to advance faster or not.

It's written by Jon Britton, the GM on the 3d6 Down The Line Actual Play series on YouTube, which I watched because they're doing Arden Vul.  I don't normally have the patience to watch Actual Plays, but Arden Vul is a huge and complicated adventure, and I wanted to run it well, and I figured watching another experienced GM run it might give me some helpful hints.  (The usual spoiler disclaimer: don't watch their series beyond Session 0 if you might want to be a player in Arden Vul.   Even Session 1 has a huge spoiler.  But I do recommend it if you know you'll never be a player in it and you like Actual Plays, and especially if you want to GM it.)

Anyway, there are 13 categories of feats: exploration, lore, rumor, secret, puzzle, trap, hazards, skills, location, NPC, faction, quest, safe haven.  And there are 4 levels of feats: minor, major, extraordinary, and campaign, which each give a different number of XP.  The rest of the pages are XP math: here's how you calculate the exact amount of XP each PC gets for doing each level of feat.  (There's also a spreadsheet for this somewhere, not included in the download.)  And there are some lists with checkboxes, in case you want to print out the PDF and then check a box when a PC achieves one of the feats.

Anyway, I'm not running D&D or anything D&D adjacent, so I didn't buy this for the XP math, so I'm not going into the details of that part.  I don't really care if a 4th level thief needs 8000 XP to get 5th level so carry the zero and a minor feat should be worth 275 XP this week.  I am, however, running a fantasy RPG and giving out character points for loot, exploration, and achievements, so I basically bought it for ideas for achievements to add to my game.   (And also to tip Jon $3 for making all those videos.)

Looking at Jon's categories, "exploration" is redundant with one I already had, though he gives an exact threshold (5 rooms) which it at least a hint that I should try to set objective levels for what counts as "enough" exploration rather than winging it too much.  (My thinking is to have two levels for exploration and loot, where the first levels should be easy to achieve and should be hit in most sessions, and the second levels should be hard to achieve and should only be hit when the PCs actually do a lot of exploring or bring home a great haul.)  "Location" feels somewhat overlapping with "exploration", but I guess the distinction is importance: if you map a bunch of empty or boring rooms you still get credit for exploration, but only important rooms give a location bonus.  So maybe in addition to giving 1 point for exploring a few new rooms and 2 points for exploring a lot of new rooms, I give a bonus point for finding an Arden Vul Iconic Location (tm) or a significant secret area.  (Not for just a random secret door.)

And "quest" is kind of obvious.  I thought of that one myself.  But I did not think of "establish a reliable safe haven," and it's a good one.  Getting a base in or close to the dungeon so you don't have to go back to town as often sounds cool, and if my players pulled that off I'd throw them an extra point.  (It's not quite as critical in Arden Vul as in some megadungeons, because Gosterwick is only a half-day's walk away, but I can see not wanting to make that walk every session if you could find a good alternative.)

I think "puzzle" and "trap" and "hazard" are a bit overlapping and a bit too generous as written; I would only give extra points for solving a puzzle or defeating a trap or avoiding a hazard if it was non-trivial.  Making a single skill roll to spot a pit or disarm a poison needle on a chest doesn't feel points-worthy, but if it's a really complicated puzzle or trap that requires a lot of thought or teamwork or especially formulating a plan and going back to base for knowledge or equipment and coming back later, sure.

"Faction" and "NPC" also kind of blend together to me; I guess you could define "NPC" as town NPCs and "Faction" as dungeon NPCs, but I'd lump it all under "if you do serious roleplay (not just a one-minute negotiation or a single Diplomacy roll to avoid a fight) to serious benefit that's probably some points."

Finally "skills" is for using equipment or abilities in an unorthodox way.  I think that falls under the general umbrella of Rule of Cool bonus points for me; if you have a clever solution that amuses everyone that might be worth a bonus point, but only once per distinct idea.  The first time you use knockback to put an enemy into lava that gets called out as the highlight of the session.  The seventh time you do it, it's just another attack mode.

The last couple of pages of the PDF list examples of other feats you could add.  Some of the examples are pretty good.  I think this is all obvious (if Jon can make rules you can make rules too, you outrank him in your game, as you're the actual GM of your game and he's just some guy on YouTube), but some new GMs haven't yet figured out that they make the final rules and what's in books are just suggestions, so maybe this is helpful for them to start spreading their wings.

On balance, should you buy this PDF?  It's $3.  If you're a 3D6DTL fan or an OSR completionist collector you probably already did.  If not, and $3 is significant to you, you don't really need it, but it might be helpful.  It's probably a bit more helpful if you're running D&D (or something D&D-ish) and doing XP calculations, because he gives you concrete numbers of XP with some examples and a spreadsheet.  (Note: if that gives you a headache, you have my permission, as someone who's played RPGs longer than most people on this planet have been alive, to never precisely compute XP and just hand out levels once in a while.  I think there's even an "official" name for that now, in some versions of D&D-ish games: Milestone XP.  Remember, the points are made up and the math doesn't matter; it's a game.  Do what's fun for your group.)

If you're not running D&D or you don't care about XP math, then this is really just a list of ideas for ways to reward your players for playing in ways that your group finds more fun.  If you need those kind of ideas, get it.  If you already have plenty of ideas, you don't need it, but it's $3 so it doesn't take much value for it to be worth it.  I only got a couple of things out of it and I think I got my money's worth.

Arden Vul: The Archontean Calendar

One of my players actually asked about the Archontean Calendar, and once again someone else already made a great web page about it which I will just link rather than recreating.  (Thanks!)

Okay, I'd feel bad making a blog post consisting totally of a link, so I'll talk about the Archontean calendar, as an non-spoiler example of how well developed the Arden Vul setting is.

The nice thing about the Archontean Calendar is that it has 12 months (easy to remember!) and each has exactly 30 days (how convenient, none of the variable days per month nonsense like we have).  Are we done?

Sadly, no.  The year on Magae is 372 days (not 365, not 365.25, not a nice evenly-divisible-by-everything 360), so that leaves 12 leftover days.  Wait, 12 days, 12 months, can't we just make them all 31 days and declare victory?  Well, that's what I would do, but the Archonteans are like the people who brought you Daylight Saving Time: never settling for a simple solution (ask your boss if you can move your shift an hour earlier in the summer so you have more time to play with bugs after work) when a more complicated one (redefine time itself for everyone!) would do.  They instead added two 6-day intercalary (new word for me; thanks Richard Barton) periods, which makes the calendar really ugly but does mean they don't have to count to 31.

Are the intercalary periods at least evenly spaced, like right at New Year's and Midsummer, or right at the solstices?  Of course not.  Again, this world feels realistic.  One of the intercalary periods (the Mercedonian Days, or Days of Wages) is right after the New Year, which is convenient.  But the other one (the Voluptarian Days, or Days of Pleasure) is two-thirds of the way through the year, between the eighth and ninth month.  Which totally makes faux-historical sense because it's the harvest festival, and harvests for annual crops in temperate climates are most often in autumn, but it drives me nuts because it's asymmetrical.  Just like our real-world calendar where we have 4 30-day months, 7 31-day months, and a 28-sometimes-29-day month.

The different year lengths and intercalary periods complicate any translations between the real-world and game-world calendars.  But it doesn't really matter much, so I probably won't bother.  If the players care deeply about the date for some reason that actually justifies burning GM time I'll track it accurately; otherwise I can mostly wing it by taking the real-world date (since we play once a week and PCs probably mostly delve once a week since all the DFRPG Town rolls are weekly) and changing the month name to the Archontean version.  The main need for dates in the game world is seasonal weather, and I just assume game seasons are roughly in sync with real seasons and use today's real-world weather in a city that's a decent analog in terms of latitude and terrain for the campaign location.

Finally, I'll mention the days of the week.  They are Basilsday, Lunday, Tothsday, Mitrasday, Tahsday, Horasday, and Demmasday.  So one for the emperor, one for the moon, one for Thoth (a greater god of the old pantheon, no longer popular), one for Mitra (new pantheon), one for Ptah (old pantheon), one for Horus (old pantheon, and not just unpopular but possibly dead), and one for Demma (new pantheon).  I just love the inconsistency; it feels like a silly jumble of historical accidents rather than something designed on purpose, just like the days here on Earth.

I guess if there's a point to this ramble it's that if you're trying to create a fictional world inhabited by humans, don't make things too neat and tidy.  Humanity is a mess of legacy systems and fiction should reflect that.