GACKS AAR: Session 9

GACKS AAR: Session 9

This week's session started exactly where the previous one left off despite 1:1 time, as last time the PCs went just far enough into the future. The situation was quite dire - four adventurers, one of whose was under 1/3 HP, stuck on the 3rd level of a barrow mound dungeon after a difficult fight against 5 wheeps. Initially, I was planning to manually create the rest of the dungeon, but didn't have enough free time for that, so we continued with Appendix A. Will the PCs find a way out, when there is only 1-in-20 chance to get a staircase on the periodic check table, and then you have to get lucky to get a staircase that goes up? They only had ~4 torches left, so they had to do it within 4 hours or be eaten by a grue in pitch blackness.

Of course, the first periodic check resulted in a staircase, but one that led down (more like let down). However, the dice were on the players' side, so they soon found a chute in the ceiling that led one level up. In a tight corridor, the PCs encountered 7 dread warriors, who weren't really a big threat, but they still dealt some injury. Then, they wandered around a bit and encountered a wandering monster and a room with monsters at the same time. The random table rolls resulted in some unusual undead creatures - a deathlock (an undead necromancer) with six painspeakers (zombies who use Truename magic to cause pain). The deathlock got impaled immediately, but not deadly enough. His first spell - finger of death - killed one of the PCs on the spot (the 'lock rolled very good, while the victim rolled very poorly; it's not always a save-or-die spell). Another one got downed by a friendly fire forked lightning. The lightning casting PC has to cast the spell ~5 times, nearly exhausting himself into unconsciousness, but he managed to get rid of most of the enemies, including the deathlock, while the berserker was taking care of the rest.

So, one PC was dead, one was unconscious and bleeding, one had minor-to-moderate injuries, and another (the caster) was stable, but in negative HP. The two conscious PCs had no First Aid skill, but the bleeding PC had HT 12, so there was a decent chance of bleeding stopping by itself. While one PC tried his best to use First Aid from default, the downed character kept bleeding profusely, rolling not one, but two critical failures, failing several times to succeed three times in a row, and badly rolling on the first death check. Thus, we had another fatality.

At this point, I thought that the characters are going to die, and we're going to spend the rest of our time playing out some unresolved battles between factions. I was wrong. Several rooms later, they managed to find another staircase leading up, and then had an encounter with 2 dread warriors. I wanted to skip the fight, because the dread warriors were barely a threat to the three-yard-long-greatsword-swinging berserker, but decided against that. Of course, the berserker rolled a critical failure on the first swing, then rolled a critical failure on the effect, breaking his sword. This is something that rarely comes up, but I did recall that GURPS Basic Set has a small box that talks about how different weapons break. The greatsword snapped in half and became only two yards long and retained the cutting attack. Due to reduced weight, the berserker could actually use it properly, which resulted in a +3 increase in skill at the cost of 1 yard of reach, thrusing impaling attack, and -2 to cutting damage. Overall, this is mostly an upgrade. Of course, he dealt with the dread warriors with his half-greatsword easily.

Nothing interesting happened on the first level, and eventually the PCs found the way out, only then realizing that their ranger with Navigation and Absolute Direction was among the dead. With 60 miles between the barrow mound and familiar lands, and being able to cover ~6 miles per day at best, it was looking like the party would die to some kind of random encounter on the way. All the rolls were made openly by the player whose PC died, and the dice were extremely kind to the party. If any encounters happened, they were something like four ponies, two goblins, a dragon that flied overhead at night and ignored the party, or an orc camp that the party managed to avoid. The party was also quite adept at avoiding their destination, because failed defaulted Navigation rolls resulted in them traveling in circles, almost going back to the barrow mound dungeon, but the dice eventually led them into familiar lands more than a month later.

During this trip, the home town of the PCs was conquered by the fainil and renamed from Wolfhome to Spiderhome. The PCs will return on August 30th, and until then who know what's going to happen to their town? Taking into account that I won't be available in September, these PCs will be in time jail until October.

In short, this was a fun session, although overland travel was rather tedious when nobody had Navigation. The result was a miracle of a survival, but will it matter? We'll see in two months, probably.