GACKS AAR: Session 1

GACKS AAR: Session 1

All right, now that the groundwork is all done, I began my in-person GURPS game that borrows a lot of ACKS procedures to see if GURPS can support a BrOSR-style game. It has been a long journey (that still isn't complete), and I've been very excited to give it all a try. I have five players whose only TTRPG experience is D&D 5e and one GURPS game that I ran for them to showcase the system. Despite this, they seem to have had zero problems understanding how 1:1 time works, and all the other BrOSR concepts as well. So, it's time to bring receipts!

We had five player characters. Since I do not have a modular character generation system ready, I went with the standard GURPS approach (for the most part). The players were given 130/-30 points, with the dark dwarf racial template being granted for free. The point budget is slightly lower than what I usually run, but also higher than what a 1st-level D&D character should be. This is intentional - the players are new, and even though I curated their character generation process, they are unlikely to create highly optimized characters. One of the players decided to try his luck and instead use one of my random character generators. What he got was a surprisingly playable cleric with a point value within 5 points of the rest of the PCs. Nice.

I won't be providing full character sheets here, but merely give a short description:

Bebarax - a randomly generated cleric of Dugmaren Brightmantle (a dwarven god of knowledge and invention, the patron of the dark dwarf subrace). Healthy, intelligent, with an assortment of useful skills, but a poor combatant. Aside from his native Dark Dwarven language knows Southern Goblin, Orcish, and Fire Giant. I rolled these languages randomly from a huge list and was surprised that I got something actually useful. Has the following spells: See Invisibility (Improved), Shape Metal 1, and Stick.

Fomtrug Ironfoot - a heavily armored explorer with a triple-barreled musket (winged tiger gun) and two small shields strapped to his forearms. Has some skills related to invention and maintenance of firearms and explosives.

Borrin Steelbeard - probably the weirdest one of the bunch. A retired sergeant obsessed with founding his own nation. Has some combat, exploration, and diplomatic skills. However, his choice of weapons is very undwarfy - he's dual-wielding sabers (yes, with the Saber skill) and also has a pistol.

Yustrud Ironhand - a berserker with a great axe. His combat skills are high, but the assortment of disadvantages (including Berserk) probably will make him short-lived. The player is aware of that, but still going with it. I respect this decision.

Galuk Mountainhand - another cleric of Dugmaren Brightmantle. This one has fewer skills, but can use First Aid, swing or fire his gun-hatchet, and has the following spells: Augury, Detect Secret Doors, Golem 1, Identify, Know Direction, Know Recipe, and Scholar's Touch.

The starting town of Or-Tabram has 460 families (260 of them urban) and is led by steward Baridmun Drakedigger. It has Market Class V. Just for the sake of it, I calculated the total income, garrison expenditure, and some other stuff by using ACKS II JJ. This actually came in handy, so it wasn't just useless number crunching.

The PCs only knew the general lay of the land in the region, but not the various points of interest. They did know that there is a settlement of human barbarians on the other side of the lake and a settlement of glimmerfolk somewhere in the woods in the west. Via Carousing, they found out that there is a depleted copper mine a few miles to the southwest, rumors of goblins gathering several miles to the northeast, and a merchant caravan falling into an artificial pit on the road with the wares then being stolen by some kind of lizardmen. Amongst the merchants there also was the neighboring stronghold's sheriff coming with a visit, and this incident made him lose his enchanted shield that he'd love to get back.

The party used Diplomacy to persuade the steward to give them control of 25 trained militia to assess the goblin danger. Then they set out for the goblin encampment. On the way there, they had a civilized random encounter (I used the ACKS II encounter system - it works well). The encounter was a group of ten dwarven pilgrims of Tharmekhul, a dwarven demigod of fire and forge. The pilgrims were on their way to found a temple in Or-Tabram. The party tried to persuade them to join their attack on the goblins, but were told off. However, this random encounter did make things interesting, as now there'll be another mini-faction in the town. Isn't that great? Perhaps, one of the future characters will be from that bunch.

Goblins appear in numbers between 40 and 400. When the party approached the encampment, I rolled the number in the open and got 396. The players tried to come up with a plan (some of the proposals were quite silly), but in the end, they had to turn back. This large number of goblins near the town is a serious threat that definitely will need to be dealt with. Yet again, this is what happens when you are not "preparing a story" - the PCs encountered a threat, assessed their capabilities, and decided that this will have to wait for later (unless the goblins will come for them themselves; perhaps I should find a patron player to run the goblin faction).

When the militia squad returned back to town, the party decided to investigate the merchant caravan incident. They went to the pit, found a pile of debris, and (through sheer luck on a defaulted Tracking roll) found footprints of the lizardmen (troglodytes, actually). On the way south along the tracks, they had to make camp (DF16 rules were used), and no night encounters were rolled. And then they lost the trail. Here's where the hex exploration rules that I adapted from ACKS II came into effect. With their slow expedition speed, they had to roll against 7 every hour (in addition to rolling a random encounter) to find a point of interest. Surprisingly, they succeeded on their second hour and got a valuable terrain encounter at the same time. Thus, they found a visible deposit of iron ore and ancient temple ruins. There was nothing of note aboveground, but they found two separate entrances to the underground portions of the ruined temple.

They chose the one that had lots of excrement nearby (they made sure to smear their weapons to spread infection and I had to persuade them that sticking feces into gun barrels probably is a bad idea). With grenades ready, they bashed open the door and found a room with five trogldytes. With a very good group Intimidation roll, Yustrud managed to scare them away. The troglodytes ran back to another room, where there were five more of them to regroup. A 10v5 fight ensued, and I have to say that the dwarves played their cards well - grenades worked wonders despite their low power. However, a good deal of luck was involved as well, as, for example, Bebarax the priest with Axe/Mace-10 managed to kill three troglodytes single-handedly. Only one gunshot found its target. There also was a friendly fire incident with Galuk swinging his axe at a troglodyte that was grappling Borrin and hitting Borrin in the unarmored neck for 5 cut instead. Everyone survived, but some of the PCs were heavily wounded, with one of them passing out. Obviously, gunfire and explosions alerted the entire dungeon and now everyone remaining knew that they've got company.

In another room, the dwarves found a pile of clothes from the caravan, rummaged through them with Scrounging, and found a roll of silk. Then, Formtrug fell into a spiked pit trap that deals 2d impaling and rolled a 2 that was completely blocked by his DR 7 armor. After that, they found a dead-end room with five more troglodytes that hid there, hoping that they won't be found, and slaughtered them with relative ease. In their belongings, they found a stack of loose papyrus sheets written in an unknown language, four ounces of black pepper (their most valuable loot this session), and a small amber, and a large bronze crown.

We had about 30 minutes of real time left, and I reminded the players that they have to get back to safety. Thus, they hauled ass and took whatever loot they found back to town. Everything was sold, except for the "book" and crown. The PCs bragged about their deeds and managed to get free lodging at the inn for a week. I awarded them 1 point (a participation award, I guess), but the loot was not enough to earn any more XP. This is where we stopped the session.

We "mined" for only two days in the future. Thus, if we are to meet again next Friday, the characters would have five days to recover and do other "downtime" stuff. I rolled natural recovery with mixed results, and the two most injured characters did not recover fully, which makes their participation in the next session potentially questionable. Would you look at that - 1:1 time made recovery mechanics actually important. Now that we're between the sessions, player characters are looking for jobs (building laborers, miners, carpenters, etc.), looking for trainers, and even designing a donkey-golem out of wood and clay.

Final Thoughts

If one looked at all of the above with the conventional mindset, he would find nothing extraordinary. However, the fact that everything happened due to full player agency and following procedures, made this so fun that I am struggling to remember when I felt this much excitement playing a TTRPG before. We have nascent factions, players planning, 1:1 time making certain mechanics important, downtime orders - everything. Following ACKS and ACKS-derived procedures worked wonderfully, and it really seems that GURPS and ACKS complement each other very well. Finally, I think I'm lucky that I found players who don't just sit there, looking at you with an empty gaze asking "What do we do?", but ones who actively plan shenanigans. So far, everything is going very smoothly, but we will see how it in the future. I'm loving the results, and I hope that this series of reports will make you consider this playstyle as well.

One of the mistakes that I made and pointed out to the players was that I should've done the rumor gathering before the session so that the players would have been able to plan ahead of the session and we wouldn't have wasted precious session time doing that. We'll do better next time.