New campaign. We’re going to be playing Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow. If that goes well, we’ll transition over to The Horrendous Hounds of Hendenburgh. If that goes well (and my Kickstarter physical rewards have arrived), we’ll then probably start a new campaign of Dolmenwood. We’ll have to decide if we want to play that with Shadowdark (and converting over) or playing Dolmenwood as its own system. Enough future stuff…Brelich is just the “shell” of a kingdom for Ragged Hollow and Hendenburgh.
We are starting this campaign with three players: Jen, Rachel, and RJ. Our first task, of course, was character creation. Given the setting and game, everyone is human. At least one character must be from Ragged Hollow and one from Hendenburgh. We’ve got a few other house rules/modes of play…more on this in a later post. We’ll pick up with the character creation below the break.
There will, obviously, be spoilers for Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow from The Merry Mushmen. My GM comments, as always, are in italics.
I think I need to preface this by noting that it had been a crazy week, I was pretty exhausted, and ended up being a bit slap-happy.
- Marlena is a priest from Ragged Hollow and is played by Jen.
- Liesl is a ranger from Ragged Hollow and is played by Rachel.
- Markus is a thief from Hendenburgh and is played played by RJ.
As we were creating characters, I started to offer little bargains to the players that would allow them to give up some of their yet to be determined gold for rerolls or bumps to stats. It got rather silly, but I think we all had fun with it. Jen was pretty conservative and kept most of her soon to be determined gold. Rachel took a little more risk and lost a little bit more money. RJ pretty much accepted every bargain offered. As a result of all of this, Jen had a more or less normal amount to spend on equipment. Rachel only had gold in single digits. RJ pretty much gambled away all of his gold and then some. He started the game owing thirty-five gold to yet to be determined parties, but he has some pretty incredible stats.
The biggest mistake I made, as you’ll see in a moment, was letting RJ reroll Marku’s Charisma. It went from a 4 to a 15. Let’s just say that he tends to interpret high Charisma for his characters as being sexy and seductive.
The campaign proper began with Marlena and Liesl returning home after their “Halloo” and after having met and befriending Markus in their travels. Marlena was trying to return home in time for the birthday of her cousin, Tobias. Markus had somehow won the deed to the Windler House (in Ragged Hollow) while gambling. Liesl was holding on to it for safekeeping. The party was two days out from Ragged Hollow and had just finished a wonderful rustic dinner with a kind farmer and his wife in the small village of Schafdorf (yes, we are going with a Germanic flavor for naming and such). Liesl and Marlena were preparing to settle down in fresh hay in the loft of the farm’s barn. And then Markus showed up…
- Arriving in the barn completely naked and with no equipment whatsoever (remember Markus started owing starting gold). He shouted up at the loft, “Drink it all in ladies.” After that, he shared that they all needed to leave…and leave immediately…as he had seduced the farmer’s wife and was caught in the act. He took off out the back of the barn and started hustling through some corn fields. (I simply asked RJ why Markus shows up in the barn totally naked and this is where he went…pretty much immediately.)
- Liesl and Marlena quickly gather their belongings. A small mob of farmers, with pitchforks and torches, are gathering. With a longing look at the barn, they choose loyalty over comfort, and trail after their naked and questionable companion. (No one has a bedroll or much of anything given the low starting gold so they’ve just been sleeping on the ground and the loft would have been heavenly.)
- Markus finds a scarecrow in the mostly harvested field and steals its clothing. Both the shirt and pants are entirely too small. The pants also have a large hole in the crotch where the scarecrow’s post had passed through. His reluctant companions catch up with him and they head down the path away from Schafdorf.
- After traveling enough to be a comfortable distance from the angry mob, the group settles down for a fairly miserable evening in relation to the loft and the country breakfast they would have enjoyed in the morning.
- During the night, a deep bellow drifts across the moors and is heard by the party. It is very difficult to determine how far away this creature might be. The sound repeats. Liesl and Marlena think it might be the Lost Ox, the namesake of the inn in Ragged Hollow. Stories vary quite a bit, but this ox was the last belonging of a farmer who was swindled out of everything else that he owned. His wife was seduced and stolen away as well. Most of the stories claim that he set off into the moors with this last ox of his and they still wander, lost and vengeful. The farmer’s corpse remains chained to the ox and it seeks out those who commit similar crimes as that done to its farmer. Stories say that the ox then consumes the offenders in some fashion. Markus was quite concerned by the stories and continued to hear the sound in his dreams during the night. (A little bit of collective impromptu to create an appropriate “morality” story to fit the setting and current context of the session.)
- The next day is pretty uneventful. The party spots a lone vulgrane flying high around midday. (Vulgrane are creatures that live in this area of Brelich. They are flying lizard creatures with a cruel intelligence but generally cowardly.)
- Just before dusk, the group reaches Ragged Hollow and things are not normal.
- A dome of golden light covers where the Temple of Halcyon should be…just the Temple’s weather vane visible above the dome.
- No one is out in the fields finishing up the day’s work.
- No one greets Liesl and Marlena returning from their Halloo.
- Voices of a crowd is heard from the vicinity of the Temple.
- Making their way through town, they found that a rather large proportion of villagers is gathered in the square around the Temple. The golden dome around the Temple is opaque and nothing can be seen beyond it. Various villagers spot the party and Liesl and Marlena recognize pretty much everyone in the crowd. They do not see family members quite yet.
- Of particular interest, Joanna, the smith, and a small group of men and older boys are trying to approach the dome, armed with various implements. A force pushes back against them. Only Joanna, the strongest person in town, reaches the dome. She strikes it with a sledgehammer and…boom…a golden flash rings out with a thunderous crack and Joanna is thrown back.
- Liesl and Marlena run over to help her up. Joanna recognizes them and gives some bad news.
- Liesl’s sister-in-law, Katrina, and her young nephew, six-month old Hans, were inside the Temple when the dome appeared around midday.
- Marlena’s young sister, Ingrid, was also within.
- In fact, a lot of the villagers, including a lot of the children, are inside as they were attending school.
- Meanwhile, Markus had started to make his way around the dome while pretty much everyone was focused on Joanna and what had just happened. He did not that there was one individual who was noting his movements.
- As Markus continued around the dome, his actions did start to attract the attention of the gathered villagers. He was a strange sight after all, wearing pants definitely too small for him and was shirtless as the also definitely too small shirt was wrapped around his waist to hide the hole in the pants. Markus paused and turned to face the square. He lifted his hand in a friendly greeting and then the shirt around his waist slipped off, falling around his ankles and revealing ALL that it had been covering.
That is where we stopped for the evening.
We did backgrounds a bit differently for these characters. As Liesl and Marlena are both from Ragged Hollow, I had Rachel and Jen pick their families (and thus backgrounds) as the characters arrived in the small town and before they had any idea as to what was going on.
Jen decided that her family are farmers and that her mother is the sister of Tobias’ mom as we had already established that he is her Marlena’s cousin. Both of her parents are alive and she has the one sister, Ingrid, trapped in the dome.
Rachel decided that her mother works at the Lost Ox Inn for Kernan Muttonchops. Her father works at the paper mill. She does have an older brother in town who is a farmer, married and with a young child. Both the sister-in-law, Katrina, and the nephew, Hans, are trapped in the dome.
RJ will still need to figure out his background. I think he also needs to figure out why he always defaults to having sex with an NPC when left to his own machinations. I mean showing up naked and with no equipment does lend itself to something like that, but there are also a lot of other things that could have led to it. We also still have to figure out in-game reasons for why he was in debt. I’m sure that Jen, Rachel, and I can come up with something quite interesting for him.
