GACKS AAR: Week 10/Session 8

GACKS AAR: Week 10/Session 8

Let's see what happened last week on the faction level and what happened during today's session. As usual, I'll list last week's SEEN posts firsts, then provide some commentary, and then go over the session recap.

Walls around Or-Tabram

The dwarves are swiftly building walls around their settlement to compliment the already existing towers.

Ogres come to Or-Tabram

A strange band of vagabonds arrived recently in Or-Tabram, a group of ogres led by one of their number, who is purple! They had goblins on chains with them. Word has it the dwarves paid this lot to go and take care of the undead problem, and as the rumor goes, they did just that.

Missing People

In the morning, Sky Riders find out that some people went missing overnight. Where did they go or who took them? It's unclear, but the level of unrest is rising.

Clan Urrgit Returns

The lands of the Sky Riders are assailed by the roaming orcs and ogres yet again. Pillaging will continue until the army is moved to the northern parts of the barbarian territory to deal with the incursion.

Undead Sightings

In the southeast, not far from the escarpment, a small squad of living dead was spotted. Some claim that they've seen a black-robed man lead them.

Ogres in the South

Ogres were spotted in the south. They rummage though caves and burrows, ignoring regular travelers. Some have heard these stupid giants complaining about being unable to deal with some fire bugs near the escarpment in [100.053].

South is Safe

The giant spider that terrorized the southern lands has finally been defeated by the ogres. Hail Moroshi, the monster killer!

Ogre Activity

Ogre tribes in the south establish their base with a fort. Many ogre allies are seen moving into the area as the new force stakes its claim. Some say that intensive mining of ores is also ongoing, what is sure however is that the smokes of many forges are seen from far away.

Dwarven Caravan

A large dark dwarven caravan from the east has arrived in Or-Tabram, trading and entertainment are abound!

Good for What Ales You

Dwarves thirsty for a drink have been turned away from the Beer Beard tavern! Every dwarf on the street knows this is an attempt to create what scholars call "Artificial Arse-ity" and hike up beer costs for honest-working dwarves.

Faction Actions Commentary

It may seem that the rumors are few, but the week was densely packed with activity. I really wish I could tell you about some insane stuff that was going on, but it's not public information yet. This week saw some changes to some of the basic rules. First, UMBROS-style GOSS was replaced by its original version by Doomstone Crom. Second, the domain encounter rules were reworked to be much closer to what Serious DM is using now in Shattered Skies/Drakonheim 2. I'll describe the gist of the changes and why they were necessary.

Before, I had each faction leader roll a d20 at the start of each week. On 2-4, there is a domain encounter, and on a 1, there are two encounters. Then, I had to determine the creature type, their numbers, and make a reaction roll, and only then use abductive reasoning to work out what actually happened. Serious reworked his own rules in the following way: the players roll two domain encounter checks each - one for a wilderness encounter, and one for a civilized encounter (to be fair, this part existed in his previous rules as well, I just combined it into a single check for my game, but that was a mistake).

For the wilderness encounter, you also roll a d100 on the encounter nature table - raid, sighting, migration, etc. The result is a report that the faction leader gets in-universe, and the faction player can then decide what to do about it.

For the civilized encounter, you simply roll 1d100 on the nature of audience table - the encounter could be a caravan that brings goods (and gets taxed), arrival of new citizens, somebody offering a magic item for sale, or a quest offer. There are subtables that determine the specifics as well.

When borrowing these rules, I had to rework monetary gain from caravan taxation (from a random flat sum to 1 gp per family of domain population) to make it scale with domain size. In addition, I added a 1d6 roll to define the race of a civilized encounter. On 1-4, the encounter is of the same race as the dominant race of your domain, and on 5-6, you have to roll randomly a humanoid creature on the wilderness encounter table.

This has fixed the issue of basically never having "civilized" encounters before, and it also offloads a lot of work to the players, and the referee now often doesn't even have to provide any input at all. Thus, this is another step into reducing the referee bottlenecking of the game.

There is another problem that popped up - reconnaissance. GURPS Mass Combat has recon contest rules to determine surprise and initiative before a battle between two armies happens, but it has no rules to determine when the opposing army was spotted and what troops can respond in time. There are mentions of "patrols scouting the surrounding area", but the extent of the area is not given. Thus, these rules are practically useless for campaigns, and are only usable for battles. This became evident during the orc and fainil raids on the barbarians that were mentioned above. A domain has a garrison and scouts, but it's unclear how it functions when defending the domain.

After reading the reconnaissance rules from ACKS II, I started to think that this is a problem of scale. ACKS campaigns assume 6-mile or 24-mile hexes, while my game operates on the 1.5-mile-hex scale, because initially I didn't even intend for it to turn into a proper Braunstein. I wanted to run a game with adventuring PCs, but try out 1:1 time and all the various procedures from ACKS. Then, when I gave another player control of a goblin faction that was spawned into existence via a random encounter roll, a Braunstein developed naturally because there was no other option. In ACKS II, it is assumed that scouts cover quite an extensive territory, sometimes spanning multiple 24-mile hexes. Recon rolls are made weekly for armies within the same 24-mile hex, or daily for armies within the same 6-mile hex. With 1:1 time and there often being multiple factions in close proximity, this is unsustainable, especially because the referee has to do all that and send intel to individual players about individual armies, and on the 1.5-mile-hex scale this would become a micromanagement hell.

There must be an alternative that would allow something like, I guess, passive Perception of a domain to be rolled upon the approach of a hostile force, and the result dictating how much of the standing garrison can be rallied in time to respond. Otherwise, I'll have to force the barbarian player to say "I place 2 archers and 3 trappers in hex [100.053], 3 archers and 2 trappers in hex [100.054]" and so on thirty more times. This is not the way to go. Perhaps, Serious DM having players write SEEN posts when mustering armies would be helpful, but it would not eliminate all the problems.

Session #8

One player is abroad, one couldn't make it due to a scheduling conflict, so we had 3 players, but 5 PCs. Isn't it nice when the game doesn't disintegrate when a player can't make it? The players were controlling the barbarian PCs this week. They had plenty of hooks - they could've tackled the orc problem, investigate the new ogre faction, deal with a new goblin camp (not mentioned in the SEEN posts above), deal with the fake (presumably) chieftain, or deal with the spider cult. Can you guess what they decided to do? They decided to follow the treasure map they found in session #2 or #3 that points to a spot 60 miles to the north.

This is something I didn't mind because, as I mentioned previously (or did I?), the map is becoming quite cramped for this number of factions. Everyone is very close together, and I have been thinking about expanding the map, so the PCs trip northward was a good excuse to dust off Appendix B to generate some terrain and have random encounters populate the world and place interesting features on the map.

The party traveled almost 15 miles through the plains without encountering anything or anyone, but this was about to change dramatically. As I'm using the ACKS II wilderness encounter procedures, one can encounter not only monsters, but also dangerous, valuable, or unique terrain, with the latter being a le natty 20 result. Of course, the next encounter check produced a unique terrain - a portal. I determined the destination and limitations randomly, and one of the characters with Curious decided to jump through the opaque green portal (secured by a rope). He dropped into an ocean with some small green islands on the horizon and a huge landmass floating in the sky. He was pulled back, and the party decided not to investigate this further.

Next up, they went through the hills where they encountered a herd of wild horses, then forested hills, where they encountered four luna moths at night. Fortunately, they weren't aggressive. On the next day, they rolled another unique terrain encounter, then rolled a 12 on the d12 table to get the "double" result, and then rolled a combination of a Place of Power and Portal. With a couple of additional rolls, we found out that they stumbled on a tower with a portal on the roof. The tower was populated by githzerai, with whom the PCs decided not to mess with.

The next encounter was a valuable terrain, but they rolled 12 on the d12 table to get the "double" result, and then rolled 12 and 12 again on that, which transformed it into a unique terrain encounter. They found an empowering shrine that emanated necromantic magic, so they decided to destroy it. Good riddance (although I could imagine so many potential faction-level shenanigans with that shrine).

I'll just say that there was two more valuable terrain encounters, a singular 6-mile mountains hex with a pass (another 1-in-20 chance), and then they finally found the place where the treasure was buried. I'll keep the contents secret for now, but I'll say that it's enough to give them all ~2 character points via gold-to-XP. They just have to bring it back home!

But as soon as they started going back, they rolled another double valuable terrain encounter - a ruined barrow mound combined with a safe haven. Thus, the barrow mound had an easily accessible and concealable entrance chamber where they could rest, but the burial chambers themselves were blocked off by a stone door.

The greed of the characters (and/or players) took the better of them, so they decided to go inside the barrow mound. Since I had no context about the area and had no idea who could be buried there, I decided that this is a dungeon inhabited exclusively by undead. Again, since I had no idea where to even begin, I began by using Appendix A to generate the dungeon on the fly. The first undead monstrosity encountered was a vitreous drinker - a spellcasting undead that can... steal eyesight with its tongue? Yeah, this is a strange one. It only managed to cast finger of death once, with the victim barely managing to avoid instant death, before being destroyed itself. A room with a bone naga held some nice loot.

Then, the PCs wisely decided to descend down the stairs three levels down, and the staircase got blocked off behind them, leaving them stranded with no food and only a few torches deep underground. Their spellcaster decided that it'd be a good idea to rest for an hour to recover FP, and once the hour passed, the wandering monster encounter check produced 5 wheeps - ST 20 zombies that cause Fright Checks by their weeping, and whose black tears are poisonous. Two PCs failed their Fright Checks badly - one was throwing up, and another fainted. Another PC got his throat fatally chewed through, another got badly injured, and eventually the PCs barely managed to prevail. This is where we stopped. One might yell "No, you can't stop in the middle of a dungeon with 1:1 time!" but we "mined" into the future until July 23rd, so we will have no problem continuing where we left off next week. I'll have some time to prepare the dungeon in advance, and we'll see if they manage to get out of there alive!

Final Thoughts

It's been an interesting week. New factions are rising, new problems are appearing, and new solutions are being tried. Appendix B hasn't been used in this game yet, so there's that as well. The content produced by random encounters and the appendices is already enough to give me something to latch on to and abduct the situation in the north. Map expansion is coming!