AAR: Southshore: Encounters on the Water

 AAR: Southshore 8/17/2024

Encounters on the Water

• L: Elboron, Human cleric 

• H: Aildun, Elven fighter/magic user

• A: Aragorn, Human nobleman

• Gl: Glizzy, Elven fighter (withdrawn)

• Gr: Gregg, Elven magic user/thief

Game time: May 31st.  Beginning off the last post, the party continued to explore the Moose Eye Lake, and trying to find the Marquis’ son.  The party initially splits the party into two, leaving two PCs behind (Glizzy and Greg) who were absent that day.  The players at the table took their canoes and explored to the SW, looking for settlements on the shores of the lake, staying 1-2 miles from shore, afraid of land encounters.  They spent a night away from the camp, and faced no encounters.

In the morning, they decided they wanted to explore around the Moose Eye, the island from which the lake is named.  As they approached, they saw a single distant curl of smoke rising above the terrain.  I allowed this due to the skies being clear and wind was minimal.  The party took interest, and attempted to force their way through heavy forest.  Instead, they found themselves turned around, and after a while came to a stop, and tried to work their way out.  Disgruntled, they decided they’d just head home.  Not quite sure I ran the lost rules right, will need to revisit.

Cutting back to the force left at the forestry camp, the two PCs were left with the instruction of doing foraging tasks, which was quite unfortunate when 19 giant wasps emerged.  I had the players present RP the absentee players, who just barely managed to dash back inside, and barricaded themselves against the insects who futilely tried to break down the door for an hour, and this departed looking for easier prey.

The party decided to break the session for the night.

The following week the party regrouped with full force, and decided they wanted to try and get to the Moose Eye.  Aragorn was certain there should be a dock somewhere.  Their first course of action was to paddle straight out to the Eye, and tried to find some access.  I rolled encounters and they encountered some men!  

8 hard men in green were spotted and the party pursued them into the open water.  The other party was standoffish, until Elboron said they were looking for the marquis’ son.  They said they could get the letter to him, but the party refused.  Instead they offered to take them back to their camp where their mistress would be able to direct them.  The party spent the next 8 hours at full oar paddling to the far side of the island, and were then stuck up held up by the bandits, who were tired of pretending to nicety.

The party elected to fight their way out, and despite having fewer bows, managed to kill the 4 archers and evade returning fire, forcing the bandits on the water to retreat.  Forced into a dire circumstance, the party escaped paddling north, but night was falling and they did not make it far, and tied their canoes together to sleep through the night.  Their rests were uncomfortable, and the night cold with the mist delivering dew to every surface.  They tried to paddle in a selected direction, but unable to navigate by moon or stars, found they had lost all points of reference.  Come morning they continued to paddle and found a shore, the sun rising in the east.  

They camped on shore for a cold breakfast, worried of pursuit and gloomily aware they are lost.  They decided to work their way counterclockwise around the lake, and after their breakfast begin working their way along the shore, unfortunately for them the wind has picked up again and around noon the heavens open with another downpour.  They drag their canoes onto shore and shelter underneath trees… or something… to wait out the storm.  

While they are sheltering, I’ve rolled for an encounter!  Around evening 11 giant toads emerge and begin approaching, hindered by the underbrush, but engage the party directly in 3 rounds.  They don’t manage to kill a single one, and instead two of their party are knocked unconscious!  Glizzy is knocked to -3, and Aragorn from 10 to -9 instantly!  (death is at -10, anywhere between 0 and -9 is unconscious, and going to be out for a long time.) Aragorn’s half brother, Elboron casts sanctuary and scoops up his dead brother and the survivors retreat.  Wet, wounded, and reduced in number, the party is left with a hard set of choices.

Thoughts

New problem:

What can player characters see in the world, in features and open terrain?  A problem at the start of this mission was the beginning to use Foundry, a VTT resource.  Completely new to me, but the whining about mapping kinda threw me over, and there are some legitimate use cases that would make figuring out how many hexes/miles traveled easier.  The issue is, pre-fog of war, the party knew too much about the terrain.  I’m weirdly specific about how I map my hexes, and the features around them.  A grassland in the middle of a bunch of forest hexes is a sure sign of SOMETHING out there.  

I’m also continuing to deal with the fallout of my adjustments of the map scale, and the juggling of subhex scale.  My regional maps are at 6mi/hex.  My travel maps are at 1mi/hex.  And my exploration hexes are at tenth of a mile per hex, or 176yds or so across, (and restricted to DM eyes only.)  The math is surprisingly clean, but the number is a bit… unwieldy.  1/10th of a mile units though are perhaps useful… maybe.  

I’m not going to go back on the scale up, as there are some areas out in the wilderness I would like a few hundred miles of howling wilderness of remoteness, and a mental dissonance when I had it scaled down.  However, there’s still going to be a lot of stuff tucked away, waiting for someone to stumble into things.  Away from the highways, away from the rivers… There is a lot of emptiness, but then a lot of stuff.  If you can find it.  If you’re even looking for it in the right place.  

Having worked as a surveyor tech for a year, bushwacking is hard, even with a GPS unit to tell you approximately where we think a property corner is going to be.  And terrain obstructions are all the more annoying.  

Modern people often forget this. Hell, I often forget it. But I suspect over time it will be overcome.

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.