The team pulls out of Dobrodzien on the morning of October 21, under a leaden sky that’s spitting the year’s first serious snowfall. Erick, Betsy, and Hernandez, running point in the UAZ-469, are quite thankful of their newly-acquired cold-weather gear. Comms takes rear guard, and Industrial Light and Mayhem slots into the middle of the merchant wagons. Moving at the pace of burdened oxen, progress is much slower than the team is accustomed to seeing from their usual mechanized pace.
Continue reading →Category Archives: Campaign and Session Logs
Dobrodzien Downtime (19-20 October 2000)
The team spends a couple of days in Dobrodzien, enjoying such marvels as hot showers and food they didn’t have to cook themselves. They also barter for a few things in the market: various items of cold-weather apparel, a set of EOD tools upon which Betsy seizes with unholy glee, a partial box of .45 ACP ammo for Pettimore’s MEU(SOC), and a handful of blank Betamax tapes.
Meanwhile, Cowboy takes point on the heavier negotiations…
Continue reading →Cards on the Table (18 October 2000)
Continuing the lightly-edited chat log transcript from the last post…
Ellis glances up from his notebook and offers the Captain a wan smile. “Captain, if I could have a word in private? And, apologies… I haven’t properly introduced myself. Case Officer Ellis, CIA oversight for what’s left of this region.”
Warren gives Dern an indecipherable look. Dern cracks a faint smile, fishes a notebook and pencil stub of his pen out of his breast pocket, and makes a short entry.
Warren stands and wordlessly gestures Ellis toward the door, then leads him outside and around to the shadows in the back of the house. “This is as private as it gets when the dinner setting is in my office. What’s on your mind, Case Officer ‘Ellis?’”
Continue reading →A Night Out in Dobrodzien (18 October 2000)
Getting caught up after far too long away from this. The following is a lightly-edited – and long – transcript of a scene played out on our Discord server after the last session.
Recap of previous play not blogged:
After lunch, Octavia and Erick check out the local school. It’s small but functional. Cowboy, Miko, Betsy, and Cat retrun to the team’s encampment to start working on Lazarus. While there, they receive a visit from Sergeant Francisco Lopez (no relation to Cowboy), who runs the maintenance/support section for Bravo Troop. He expresses very strong interest in taking Lazarus off the team’s hands for the right price. Bravo Troop has two light tanks, seven other light combat vehicles, and a collection of HMMWVs/equivalents, but no recovery vehicle. So any time anything breaks down, another combat vehicle has to be the one to tow it home.
Shortly after that, Betsy overheard one of the radios in Comms receiving a transmission. Bell had left it on while he went into town for downtime. The conversation was in Russian – one party clearly in a firefight, the other party not. With no one present who spoke Russian, Erick and Betsy grabbed the team’s tape recorder and got most of it for later analysis. Cat did recognize the candence and repetition of one part of the transmission as a call for artillery support – indicating someone out there speaks Russian and has access to artillery. Comms’ direction-finding gear pointed south-southwest as the source of the transmission. Cowboy’s supposition, based on that, was that the Soviet 129th Motor Rifle Division is getting into it with the Army of Silesia.
Picking up the in-character thread:
The team (Betsy, Cat, Cowboy, Erick, Ellis, Pettimore, and NPC Hernandez) heads down to Bravo Troop’s encampment for their dinner engagement with Captain Warren. Along the way, the group passes the town’s medical clinic – closed for the evening, but with the glow of an electric light visible through the windows. Hearing no generator, Betsy infers battery power.
Bravo Troop’s encampment is in a former lumber yard. There’s a sign on the gate making it obvious who the new tenants are:
B Troop
1st Squadron
116th Armored Cavalry Regiment
Idaho National Guard
Two gate guards are on duty – uniformed, armed, geared up, alert. One of them escorts the team to the building that used to be the lumberyard office, now the HQ building and CO’s residence. The front half is still in use as a cramped office. First Sergeant John Wheeler (previously encountered) is at one of the desks. He stands, closes the notebook he’s writing, in, greets the PCs, and escorts them into the back.
Continue reading →Chapter V: Return to the Flooded Crypt of the Necromancer
This should have been subtitled Vengeance for Vraazox. Following their narrow escape, Tulk and Hazel swore vengeance on the ghostly necromancer who’d slain their friend. They went back with reinforcements:
- Tulk: marked half-orc, ranger 3
- Hazel Ravenvale: outcast halfling, thief 2
- Nubbin Stump: drawn halfling, fighter 2
- Ylva Fekyue: outcast halfling, bard 3
- Mirena the Outcast: outcast human, priest of Freya 1 (reserve PC for Vraazox’s player)
… this crew sure does seem to attract a lot of halflings and outcasts for some reason.
Continue reading →Chapter IV: The Flooded Crypt of the Necromancer
I’ve been trying to run Somewhere West of Light in a West March-ish, if not purely West Marches, style. Part of this is giving the players a log of available quests/delves in our Foundry server so they can choose where to go next. The players decided to pursue the following:
Hajnal, the ancient elven witch who lives in Plainwood’s slums, has sought you out. Something or someone is killing any practitioners of her art who enter the lost province. She’s so far managed to remain safe by staying in Plainwood – the responsible parties don’t seem to be able or willing to enter the town. But she would very much like this matter laid to rest.
Her divinations, though hampered by the proximity of so many destinies, have shown her the location of someone who may be able to provide information about these killings. She’s unable to provide more information than that, but she has given you a location: a former holy place of Gede, long abandoned.
The crew consisted of:
- Tulk: marked half-orc, ranger 3
- Vraazox da Pryist: wolfchild goblin, priest of Memnon 3
- Hazel Ravenvale: outcast halfling, thief 2
They entered the delve site expecting a level 1 adventure, and the completion of the first milestone of the quest chain that will unlock the witch class (Cursed Scroll #1) for PC use. The GM should not have taken the module author’s word at face value…
[Spoilers follow for Flooded Crypt of the Necromancer, which appears in Shots in the Dark #1.]
Continue reading →Chapter III: The Blackbridge Labyrinth
I felt like running Shadowdark tonight. Pop-up dungeon!
Hired by a young boy to locate his missing brother, the crawlers traveled to the tiny (and oddly underpopulated) village of Blackbridge. Tonight’s crew consisted of:
- Tulk: marked half-orc, ranger 3
- Vraazox da Pryist: wolfchild goblin, priest of Memnon 3
- Ylva Fekyue: outcast halfling, bard 2
- Yuri Völvason: witchborn human, priest of Ord 2
[Spoilers follow for The Blackbridge Labyrinth, which appears in Shots in the Dark #1.]
Continue reading →Skunk Curse
As noted in yesterday’s session writeup, I took a swing at homebrewing a Shadowdark creature to give my orcs a little magical support. This was loosely based on the core book’s kobold sorcerer, with some orcish flavor:
These were nasty opponents, made all the more so by the PCs’ focus on their screening mooks. This let them keep casting Wolf Call for several unimpeded rounds, and the wolf spam threatened a TPK at one point.
I only got one Skunk Curse off, and I giggled far more than I should have when describing its effects.
Chapter II: Return to the Hoard of the Sea Wolf King
Having left their pilferage incomplete, the crawlers decided to return to the tomb of Skorgald and finish clearing it out. Upon setting out from Plainwood, the party consisted of:
- Hazel Ravenvale: outcast halfling, thief 1
- Kais: mercenary human, wizard 1
- Nubbin Stump: drawn halfling, fighter 2
- Tulk: marked half-orc, ranger 2
- Vraazox da Pryist: wolfchild goblin, priest of Memnon 2
- Ylva Fekyue: outcast halfling, bard 2
- Shiraal: marked half-orc, thief 1
[I had originally intended to run Somewhere West of Light as an occasional pop-up and backup game when we didn’t have a quorum for Kaserne on the Borderlands. However, this was a scheduled Kaserne session where the GM wasn’t prepared to run, so this was a much larger party than I’d intended for this campaign.]
Continue reading →Chapter I: Hoard of the Sea Wolf King
The lost province was once an imperial crossroads. It is said that an ancient northlander king once came south in search of glory and treasure and cut a bloody swath through these lands before the Old Empire finally stopped him. Struck a mortal wound by an imperial champion, he was carried from the field of battle by his followers, who entombed him near the site of his greatest triumph on the banks of Lake Aster. For centuries, his burial site was hidden from mortal view, but the ancient spells woven by his priests and seers have begun to fray…
Armed only with the information above and a good supply of blades and torches, a group of crawlers set out from Plainwood to seek the long-lost burial site. Tonight’s party consisted of:
- Nubbin Stump: drawn halfling, fighter 1
- Vraazox da Pryist, wolfchild goblin, priest of Memnon 1
- Tulk, marked half-orc, ranger 2
- Ylva Fekyue, outcast halfling, bard 1 (player joined late, PC introduced in play)
The following post may contain spoilers for Hoard of the Sea Wolf King from Cursed Scroll Vol. 3: Midnight Sun.
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