AAR: Southsoure: Rain, Traveling, Rain, Wet

 AAR: Southsoure: 7/27/2024

System: Lance and Tome (AD&D clone by Rick Stump)

Players

• L: Elboron, Human cleric (partially present)

• H: Aildun, Elven fighter/magic user

• A: Aragorn, Human nobleman

• Gl: Glizzy, Elven fighter (absentee)

• Gr: Gregg, Elven magic user/thief

The night of May 24th ingame the party decided to take up a Marquis on his request that they pursue his errant son.  I began my prep, first rolling up the weather.  Play ended on the morning of May 31st.  This is the weather the group faced:

Only the 1st week of weather rolled.

The weather continuation stats used were from Seaward.  As were the INITIAL precipitation numbers.  (I had to adjust down the first number, as I ended up with 21 inches of accumulated rainfall.  Insane.  So some adjustments need to be made… )

The first 4 days were apart of a heatwave, which applied to my weather charts is double the dice I roll from the base condition.  There’s some oddities, like it getting very cool in the evening… but that’s acceptable for a first pass.  The rain though was not very useful, except in delaying the party’s embankment, as it was raining heavily with unfavorable winds, 

Most of the rest was normal, with some quite windy days, but did factor into their movement… sometimes.  

Much of the start of the session was harassing the party about getting their logistics in order.  They were provisioned 3 large canoes, 200 lbs of standard rations, and 40 lbs of charcoal.  But many of them hadn’t paid a whit of thought to camping out in the bush.  They purchased more rations, but I had to chastise a player for having 14 weeks worth of rations, which were listed at 40 lbs each.  Major typo.  Easy fix.  

I provided them with a stove at 10gp, but they didn’t think to bring a tent.  I gave them leniency with a bedroll (not listed, but they were asking about it, so props for them thinking about it) but not a tent when they realized “oh we have NO cover from the elements when camping in the plains.”  

They were also quite stingy about resource usage, and while I had a few small waypoints they could sometimes use that would also sometimes be used by other users of the river--trappers, loggers, bandits,etc--they were quite stingy and imprecise with how long they wanted to have the fire burning.  And since they don’t want to do the work to calculate how much charcoal they’re burning… well.  I guess I’ll have to guesstimate.  5 gallons of water a day, for each of them plus time for cooking, 5/8th of a lb of charcoal for the water, then the remaining 3/8s plus another half pound for cooking/heat to last a little longer?  SURE.

They brought waterskins, but no barrels (I think).  One character has 10 units of ale.  They were relying on the ability to shelter each night under the bare sky to pure chance.  They were delayed several times by the weather turning on them.  They thought they could by pure chance PURCHASE a map with useful intel--I thought he had just purchased map making tools, not a MAP--to which I informed them they were in the bare wilderness, and it’s only a contrivance of persistent begging that I finally agreed Foundry was a good tabletop asset for hex crawling (and the only reason it wasn’t under fog of war was L, the owner of the asset, wasn’t available except by phone.)  

This is wilderness territory.  Hardly anyone has much in the way of MAPS about what is exactly here.  The trappers might know something.  The loggers might know something.  The players questioned neither group, prior to heading out.  Their loss.

First couple game days were sitting out a serious storm.  The 3rd day was them trying to desperately row upriver, against the current, on an engorged river.  They encountered a patrol, who offered them a little bit, after hailing to see who they were.  They marked a way station used by those using the river, just a handful of cabins to provide shelter and a good fire.  No permanent habitation.  A good camp for patrols or other folks, on the banks of Swan Lake.  They asked a few questions about Marquis Louis’ AWOL song Francis.  The patrol knew little more than they did.  

The 2nd day of travel, they followed the southern shore, and encountered x3 giant otters playing on the shoreline.  They didn’t interrupt them, and carried on paddling.  They reached the second waystation on the lake, and decided they wanted to press on. This carried them upriver into the plains, and as they stepped ashore a group of mustangs were encountered, which warily elected to ignore them, and continue drinking.  There was some talk of trying to hunt them, but as neither was surprised and there was a great deal of talking before that, they decided eventually against.  

The 3rd day broke with rain clouds threatening to open up over top of them, and they had no tent.  As they packed up for the morning, Aragorn capsized his canoe, and realizing the temperature had a high of 57, panicked about the cold.  Unfortunately for them, the next 10 hrs was going to be half an inch of rain, every hour.  They dragged their canoes out of the water, flipped them over, and huddled underneath, shivering and waiting out the storm.  At the end, shortly after 3pm, they aimed to get at least a few hours travel in, and paddled  up another 3 miles before stopping.  

They camped again, suffering a failure to dismount, capsizing once more, this time H’s PC, twice falling into the water and ending up huddled in a lent cloak.  The night was quiet, and the next day they mounted up.  Soon after embarking they encountered a clutch of large spiders on the north bank, just chilling, but not especially threatening as they were over there, and not able to get to them.  They ignored them.

Finally, they got to Moose Eye Lake, a massive body of water, and encountered a logger’s camp, recently packed up, near the outflow of this lake.  The camp was neatly abandoned, with almost every tool having been removed, and only a handful of structures left for whoever came by, but secured against bears and other wildlife.  

They cleared the structures, and then chose the mess as their base of operations.

There was some discussion to split the party to begin searching the lake, but that was soon nixed.  After a bit of further discussion, it was decided we best end the session early.  

Failures

I was not very good at estimating how much time I would need to read up on the various subsystems in the WSG.  Temperature should have been a big one, but I didn’t thoroughly read through it, which was unfortunate when the bastards tipped a canoe, and A’s char got really concerned about hypothermia.  They also got unlucky the next few days, when H’s char twice tipped a canoe.  Curiously, they didn’t take any steps to try and mitigate tippage.

Time tracking was another big thing.  Exactly when they did things was a difficulty as 1) they didn’t have a plan or firm set of activities they were accomplishing each night.  I had to keep pestering them for a set of SOPs.  2) There’s a lot of work shifted onto me, as I’m checking charts, rolling for random encounters, checking those results, navigating the book, and trying to use one utility I’ve built, an utility I’ve never handled before, and going back and forth for different WSG tables, from fire starting times to seeing if I can parse the temperature tables in 5 seconds.  Part of this is I REALLY want logistics to be a thing drilled in their heads this trip.  They can’t stay out here indefinitely.  

And I suspect they’ve already realized that, partly.  But their planning is lackluster.  They put a bit of thought into this… but not enough to really matter.  If they encounter the marquis’ son, it’ll be by accident.  

A third thing is a disparity in expectations.  I fastidiously plan adventures that go deep into the wilderness.  The prep for the expedition to Skull Mountain:

It goes on.

A partial list of the supplies we purchased.  The gross weight was in excess of 3000 lbs.  We had 7 days to travel to the mountain, on a conservative estimate.  Unlike my players, we did not leave to chance whether or not we would be able to find shelter, water or fuel.  But then, we all were readers of Rick’s blog, and paid a great interest to logistics as a whole.

When my players figure that out, we’ll probably be able to converse more easily.

AAR: Southshore 7/11/2024

System: Lance and Tome (AD&D clone by Rick Stump)

Players

• L: Elboron, Human cleric

• H: Aildun, Elven fighter/mage user

This week’s session was an ad hoc play in the middle of the week with whoever could show up, because otherwise I would not be able to play at the regular time at all this week.  I had hoped to prep some materials in previous days, but wasn’t successful, and showed up to the session with only the faintest of clues of what might happen or with who.  

I am vaguely transcribing these events from memory and a scrap of paper I had previously struck turn times and resources from Burmstone-Aeravir campaign.  

Unfortunately, two players were otherwise occupied by the First Foe, scheduling.  But L and H were able to appear, and were looking for a smaller, less dangerous adventure, but also seeking to hire some henchmen from Southshore.  They started out on May 3rd, arriving in Southshore on the 4th, and completed the search for henchies on the 7th.  

There was some wheedling to try and gain some advantage or freebies, which I largely rebuffed, as I fished out Rick’s henchmen rules.  And then got very unlucky trying to hire the bard hench and man-at-arms hench, offering only a measly 100gp initial pay.  I offered a +20% effective for church contacts that L could leverage, and discounted their initial costs for seeking henchmen.  It was a good little dabble into what the rules had to offer, but also exacted on the players.

ANother thing the players were interested in was work.  Rolling against my rumor chart for the sort of things you’d find on the notice board, they found notice of a tourney that would be held on the 21st, and more instances of trappers requesting help with wild frogmen of the swamps.  But they also heard through church contacts that some men have gone missing after wandering into the hilly preserve west of Southshore.

DM notes: I had nothing planned as really going on in this part of the world yet.  A quick call for help yielded little I could find quickly, and so I just… winged it.  I had the random encounter tables of the books, which would almost certainly kill these two inexperienced and green players.  So I improvised.

I vaguely wrote down 8 people had gone missing.  I vaguely decided “10 bandits is enough to be an issue, out there slaving/trying to just avoid notice.” and selected a hex that would serve as a base of operations.  And then given the danger in the area, the number of players, made a very quick random encounter table for the zone, ranging from escapees, to deer, to 1d4 bandits out patrolling their little block.  All of this was improvised on the fly, and was … OK.  A few things could have DEFINITELY been done better.  

Right from the start the players wanted to wander through the wooded hills, dragging along a mule, only lightly laden, but they were still only moving about 10 miles a day.  Days 8,9,10 are spent searching, in hopes of finding something.  I was letting them dictate their own search pattern, and checking if they got lost once a day.  On Day 11, they went to a Human/dwarven mine and asked the locals if they knew anything.  I improvised a trapper who’s son was missing, and the man led them to the boy’s camp, which had signs of ransacking.  

Day 12, they cut to the Great Lake, and then traveled only a little ways east, then turned north.  I gave another bone, and they encounter… the camp!  A small thing, in a thinner hex of pines.  They sent off first the trapper to go spread word of this discovery, and then they laid in to wait.  Aildun the F/MU was leaning heavily on his elven traits to avoid detection, and did a easy circular scout of the camp.  During this time, the bandits led out a small work party, intent on collecting wood.  Thinking quickly they had Aildun climb a tree, where he hoped to trigger an ambush from, while leaving Elboron on the ground.  I rolled surprise for the bandits… and they were not surprised!  Had to double check the rolls, but Aildun was not the most pleased with how this turned out.  Had they had thieves, rangers, or scouts, things would have turned out differently!

Combat was over within three rounds, with Aildun lancing one bandit down with magic and the other crushed brutally by Elboron.  The enslaved men were a little shocked to start, but then rushed to the adventurers and insisted they put distance, as the combat was heard, investigated, and the dead men discovered!  They hasten back to the mine, and end up reuniting father with son (rolled a 1d8)

Day 13, they head down the road to Southshore and report the encounter to Sir Langley of one of the patrol groups, and then ask to tag along.  An error: should have rolled a reaction roll.  Ah well.  

On the ride out, the patrol encounters an escapee, which one of the players successfully IDs as a prisoner who was said to be missing earlier.  I awarded 5xp (yes yes, stingy) to encourage the thinking.

Day 14, the bandits were encountered, and after two surprise segments that killed one, the bandits surrendered without drawing any blades.  Four bandits were taken prisoner, and a camp was pitched to ensure the cabins were burned, after being looted of useful supplies and treasures.  The patrol claimed 4 of the gems and the jewelry discovered, and left the rest of the discoveries to the players.  Too generous, but that’s a musing for later in the article.

The patrol and party return to Southshore on the 15th.  To get the two magic items in their inventory investigated, I charged them 200gp.  Once they realized the gems were randomly diced for, they were a lot less interested in the hedge mage taking the two gems as payment, shucks.

The magic was as follows:

• Ring of Water Walking [claimed by Elboron]

• Dust of Disappearance, 50 charges (5-50 listed, rolled 1d10*5) [claimed by Aildun]

They had also found a map with details of the western coastline, marking different caves along the shoreline.  

After calculating loot divisions and experience, the party was elated to learn they could level up… and horrified of the time and expenditures required to do so.  The Elboron I had rated at as 3 over two sessions, and so in L&T his base upgrade cost per week is 500gp and he will require three consecutive weeks, uninterrupted, to go from 1st to 2nd level.  They were very grouchy about this, while I laughed and explained it’s three times as bad in AD&D proper.  

Musings

In the future, I’m uncertain how to decide what official help will be offered to adventurers, and extent of cooperation.  A 1st level party is little better than a mob of civilians.  And any issue that’s passed to them means it’s now the ruling lord’s issue, and he's at risk of losing men. Not an insignificant set of treasury may be asked for. In a patron role I'm playing for a friend, I have the following chart:

I will warn, some of the assumptions of that game are weird, as it's a combination of ACKS and 5e, and so a patrol is not the mounted wall of horseflesh and various leveled fighters, and a MU or Cleric. But this is what I consider "generous" as the lord over this patrol. If that patrol perishes, I'm down 30 men, a member of the lesser nobility, and all of their gear. This is very expensive in time and silver (silver standard rules Karameikos.) So while I would love to encourage adventurer activity, I must also ensure the lord takes care of his own fiefdom. If two patrols don't come home, but the adventurers manage to survive, I'm somewhat tempted to hang them for gross incompetence.  Don’t get my men killed needlessly.  

Difficulty

These players are very new, and while these two are getting the hang of things a bit better than the others, I’m a bit shy at this time to roll up any/all random encounters and have them suddenly facing down a warband of orcs where they shouldn’t be.  I have some ideas of the factions out there, but none are quite as dangerous as the DMGs random encounter tables.

Prep

Finally, this served as a good demonstration that I need to build up a book of maps and some adventures, ranging from small to large, beginner to advanced, that can be used for cases such as these.

AAR: South Shore 6/29/2024

System: Lance and Tome (AD&D clone by Rick Stump)

Players

• L: Elboron, Human cleric

• H: Aildun, Elven fighter/mager user

• A: Aragon, Human nobleman

• G: G, Elven fighter 

Forewarning: This AAR will be fairly rough.

On whim started a L&T game, after declaring an interest in starting in a video gaming community that I’m apart of.  This was very spur of the moment, when I was talking with the Pathfinder 2e DM about… something.  I don’t entirely remember what, but I showed him my map of Southshore, and soon after posted late night an intent to attempt to host a game.  

1 hex = 1 mile

As no player had heard of this system before, it took a bit of explaining. I attempted to obscure it’s AD&D origins… but that was a lost cause to start with. Despite that, there were still a handful of interested individuals, and solid discussion in a few days led up to the first session.

Now, I like old editions is because there are fewer mechanical choices one has to ponder.  You roll your stats, you select your race, class, arms and armor and equipment, and you’re off to the races dungeon, once you have all that and have read the related abilities and applied a bit of logic.  Choose your flavor of ice cream and pay at the till.  

Unfortunately, many players were expecting something closer to 5e or Pathfinder I suspect.  There was a great deal of handholding through character creation, from the most engaged to the least.  The idea that only some races can go so high or do some things was very alien, even with the explanation that magic could circumvent some of these issues.  For a solid two days before, and eating most of the time I thought I might take to create, stock, and prepare the dungeon environment… was instead teaching them the specifics of how I administrate a custom spreadsheet for tracking EVERYTHING, and diving into some of the deeper but not yet relevant pieces of info.  

Much of this could have been alleviated by some diligent reading.  Unfortunately, a Discord permissions issue resulted in many not being able to locate the channel.  Not all the folks in this space were proficient tech users.

Now, despite being crunched for time, I had at least a basic idea of a dungeon.  An old dwarven crypt, where some heroes were interred from ages past.  A simple enough layout of rooms, with simple enough sketching out, and some simple secrets they could discover and exploit.  Some simple threats they could face off against and some treasures that would be small potatoes, but might at least catch their interest to start with, as well as go over the mechanics of dungeon delving, and the combat system (another change I quite like.)  The treasure and the threats were both toned down, as I had no time to really prepare or consider.  But in a discussion with some friends after, putting a gray ooze was a certain error…. 

I situated this location near a village, said it was discovered by some shepherds, and left it at that.

I had a very basic plan for this session which consisted of attempting to explain the systems, and not spook anyone away with a one-hit-KO.  This is something I extend to first time players only.  None of these players have played a system with high lethality, to my knowledge.

But that plan turned a bit more basic, and a bit more railroad than I would have liked.  Having very little in the way of plans, or prepared materials, I was decidedly unamused by G’s chaotic nature and asking about the profitability of sheep, and wanting to leave and bother the farmer about the price of cattle.  L and H were much more engaged, and willing to work with what material I had presented to them.  Thanks kindly fellas.

An issue that caught my attention, is the party seemed a little disinterested at exploring the first room I presented them:

An embalming chamber/forayer, with a heathen altar on the west wall, coffers on the east, and a stone table about waist height in the center.  The altar and table were investigated, but the coffers forgotten.

The cleric also after I revealed my ad hoc declaration that this was a ancient god of death… well, he became somewhat disinterested in sacking the place in particular.  Far as I was concerned, this was an inert dungeon, far as magic and demonic energies were concerned.  Some passive/very old undead guardians, untriggered traps… and that was it.  And importing my own logic, I would have no problem tipping over the coffins in search of wealth. 

So that was/is a mystery.  Especially since giving up a share of the treasure is giving up experience.

The next room was a storage space of coffins, caskets, and a sarcophagus.  There were pathways wide enough to talk that led to the two far corners, one of which had a door, that openned away.  And that then descended deeper underground, and lead to some pristine polished hallways, and I started to have them explore deeper into the dungeon, and where they might face the first real threats and treasures.

I think they caught on to the dungeon crawling aspect fairly well.  Even had one play mapping, before IRL duties caught up to him.  The majority of them were attentive, and that’s about as good as I could ask for first timers.  However, when they started to argue for IRL minutes about the division of 23 silver pieces… I started counting the minutes to apply in game.  That’s not the time to do it.  And at one point chastised them when they began to argue again.  I was tired and frayed, and didn’t want to here them try and divide the next set of 23 sp, AGAIN.  

I soft locked them out of part of the dungeon (insert here, dungeon under construction meme), and they explored a hallway with “statues”, which were a last minute modification, because I wasn’t sure how to stock static threats in a dungeon.  They would otherwise have been undead, and that fight might have ended up as a slog.  

I ran two small encounters that at least gave them a taste, but ended too early to really give them an idea of how it functioned.  No surprise segments were achieved during any encounter.   

First (not really) Time DMing

There are/were some details of specificity about dungeon crawling, in terms of time I’m not sure I got completely right.  I sketched out a dungeon with just under 40 rooms, and began to dot it with additional features… I forgot to trigger a pit trap, failed to figure out how to communicate map directions with the one player who picked up the not so subtle hintings (and H did a good job of it, with the limited resources to hand) and wasn’t sure how to establish how they were going about passing through the dungeon.  H did figure out from reading the rules that there was a definite possibility for secret panels and passages, and it’s a baked in expectation, and used it.  I rolled a few times, and he did discover a secret door!  

The pencil indicates North

But I failed to establish an understanding or provide good descriptions of how they were moving through the dungeon, and where or when they were moving. That was a problem. Since H, who was taking any time to map, had to step away for an hour and they were left without a mapper, I ended up copying what they explored later. I explained this hand holding won’t continue. This is just as part of the first session where a lot of things weren’t going great, namely my sleep.

G was the problem player, while he’s generally enthusiastic, he was distracted and zoning out, and not participating.  He also hopped in last minute.  I’d like to keep an open door, but I might have to modify that policy in the interest of the players who take an active interest, and read up on the rules.  

Many players also were reliant on me as the sole fount of information.  I have relatively little experience in some of the systems, and don’t have encyclopedic knowledge.  How cantrips and Orisons and other spell stuff work is not something I knew off the top of my head.  I have played a single AD&D magic user in the last year, and not for very long.  Cantrips in L&T are not like 5e’s FREE, NO COST DMG, but smaller utility spells that are STILL Vancian casts.  Talking H through that took some time.  Figuring out what spells he started with required pinging another Discord, who helpfully provided the page # in the DMG.

Also, way, way too much work went into getting people familiar with my own spreadsheet, which looks like THIS:

Not for the faint of heart

There’s a ton of information I record for QUICK reference and to do things in a certain specific fashion.  This is not necessarily the most useful thing for a first time player.  And combined with many players not reading the instructions I posted in the dedicated channel, checking the pinned comments, or checking over the rulebook with at least a cursory glance… I am spent in terms of social energy.  

Now, I do plan to continue next week. Hopefully with people at least equipped with a taste I can get my house in order and carry on, and now I have specific course of play questions I can hunt for and answer. I've already spent time checking through my print of Far Realms and will be going through Lance and Tome’s early copy more thoroughly.  Having a reason to read and memorize it will give me a lot more motivation to give it a cover to cover browse.