Against the Cult of Nergal
Cast:
Aberlardus – The barber indebted to Geilar for saving his life. Played by Fred.
Eban – The Sorcerer. Hungry for magical power. Played by Adrian.
Geilar – The Raider. A Vandal prince who stole the ring of the King of Corsica. Played by Ray.
We started the game in media-res. The caravan the characters were escorting was attacked by what appear to be indigenous nomads. The sorcerer acts first, and with some foresight, by creating a stone barrier around one of the nomads who is trapped there. Geilar charges a large concentration of raiders with his gang, but is repulsed. Geilar took the move Last Stand so elects to face the enemy force by himself on one flank, while the rest of the group attempts to attack the other flank. Aberlardus goes to Geilar’s aide. With a few good rolls the nomads are beaten back and retreat. The character’s have a prisoner.
The caravan master, Calix of Damascus, tells the characters that his rare beetles (a delicacy around these parts) have been stolen, but even worse the nomads kidnapped his daughter. He beseeches the characters to go find her. The characters agree for a fee then interrogate the prisoner. The raider starts torturing him, allowing Eban to manipulate the captive. The nomad talks saying they took her to an abandoned barn and adds cryptically that “She is to be give to the One that rises from Meslam”.
The captured raider leads the group to the barn. The nomad claims that they have taken the girl into the tunnels under it. Eban casts the light spell on the captive. They go into the tunnel and after a long walk enter a large room where the captive is shot in the chest and killed by 2 other raiders. They run, but the sorcerer casts a fire spell blocking the way. One of the raider knocks the other one into the fire, and he is subsequently killed by Geilar’s gang. Since it’s difficult to carry a glowing body Geiler decides to cut the body to pieces and hands out body parts to the group to use as torches. (I added a level of taint here because this was pretty gruesome and the players were treating the captive pretty callously.) Eban took the create fire, but not the control fire spell, so the fire can’t be stopped. He had to cast Stone Spell to turn the burning stones away from the tunnel. They continue and emerge from a trap door into a house.
The house is empty right now. Eventually the players leave (Geilar’s gang stays behind in the house waiting for the sign) and poke around town, finding a few things. The name of the town is Karak and there are several issues going on. Animal pit fights, infighting amongst the ruling houses, and of course mysterious disappearances. The characters ignore the pit fights and go directly to the militia and bully help from them by showing them the glowing body parts, claiming they are from some weird cult. The militia captain admits he has heard rumors that the cult of Nergal has been up to no good, but that cult has been dead for hundreds of years. We assumed that most of the inhabitants are Christian with a few Judiasts here and there. With amazing perception rolls they figure out that everything points to one of the weakest noble families.
They convince the militia to give them authority to search the family’s compound. While there they use perception moves to find a secret doorway. Once inside they come to a large room with some demonic statue at one end. There are body parts all over the place (all those disappeared people) and 3 masked nomads. Spirit rolls are made, but the barber gets a minimum success; he takes the -1 spirit and we move on. The nomads attack the characters. Abelardus jumps to block the attackers to prevent harm befalling Geilar, and is badly wounded (received the unstable condition). A fight ensues, with 1 of the nomads getting killed and the rest escaping. Geiller gives the signal, the sorcerer causes the body parts to flash, and his gang is on its way. One of the nomads ends up killing several of the militia guards and then scales the walls of the compound like a spider. The other nomad is killed by Geiler’s gang. The killing of the guards causes the family to escape and a chase ensues.
They reach the outskirts of the city and Eban causes the groundsunder the family head to rumble and they all fall. The group catches up to them and slaughters most of the family except one of the servants who agrees to take them to the Temple of Nergal.
The characters arrive at the ruined temple and come up on a ceremony. The sorcerer can tell that the ceremony is charged with magic energies. Geiler tells Eban to prepare the Stone Spell to collapse the temple. The characters charge in, and with crazy rolls manage to push back the cultists who outnumber them. Abelardus then runs up and grabs the girl, but he is hit by the high priest (who is the surviving nomad from the shrine encounter in the city). He rolls over the altar with the girl and they escape. The rest of the group pulls back, and Eban causes the temple to collapse on all the cultists killing them.
The characters head back and collect their reward.
Epilogue:
The final scene shows the blood of all the dead cultists running to the altar. It then opens and two large Hell Knights step through. The end.
Observations:
1. I gave all the characters 2 free advancements in return for 2 free taint points that I used to bring the Hell Knights through. Seemed pretty cool, but taint points seem hard to get unless I give them to the characters for doing naughty things.
2. Ray’s son, Adrian, played the sorcerer this time and he did great (when he wasn’t playing on his Ipad – hey he’s only 15). The sorcerer can be pretty powerful especially with the advanced spell schools.
3. The players were rolling insanely well. A few bad rolls by Aberlardus caused him to get wounded pretty bad though.
4. Having heavy armor is crazy. The raider is neigh invincible, especially if his gang is there and he takes the Veteran’s move of “Last Stand” which allows him to take on large groups with impunity. He’s also maxed out with spirit and equipment. Not sure why this is. The player rolled amazing throughout the game though, so there’s that.
5. Most of the characters went up 2 advancements throughout the game. Not sure if it’s too easy.
6. I have to say though that the players were taking more of a gamist approach as they were picking moves and advancements that they were most likely to succeed on, or that gave them the most bonuses. Really would like to take them away from that mentality, but at the same time it’s strange because they are usually not like that.
7. Players complained that they had to relearn the system, but that’s on me since we don’t play AW type games enough. There were some minor complaints about the rolling to attack then rolling for all the damage affects, but that was chalked to being unfamiliar with the system.
8. Players are eyeing the “Compete to become Ceasar” move, but we couldn’t figure out what it actually means. Players thought that they get their own fief or something like that. I thought that it means you can compete to take over the IF. Maybe this should be clarified.
9. Geiler’s player also wanted to see if there could be moves to increase the size of the war band.
10. In the beginning I started planning the game using Covetous Poet, but this game creation system is really bulky. I stopped and just ended up using the front sheets provided in the game. This was great, but I made a bunch of side adventures which the players totally ignored. I did end up using the countdown clocks and told the players, so this may have been why they were in such a hurry to find the girl.
11. Overall the game went well and it was fun. Ray’s son really liked it.
Wow bad formatting.
Richard Sardinas thanks for report! I will go over the various points and give you some feedback! Thanks again!
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Richard Sardinas I forgot to ask you the most important question: will you be playing a second session with the same guys and continue the adventure? Hey, it’s not an issue if you don’t! But I have some suggestions/some rules tuning I’ve made since v.0.9 and it would be great to try it out with the same people – to get an exact feel of how things change, in regard to some of the points you mentioned. Let me know! and thanks again!
Cool. This is actually our second session. Only difference is that insread of Eban being a gm pc he was played by a player. I think the players have been having fun so we will continue. There are a couple of loose ends that need to be taken care. We will probably continue the game until the character’s stories are done.
Richard Sardinas first thanks again for the feedback.
So, several of your points emerged in a similar form, or close enough, also in other games, and here’s what I am working on, for v.0.93.
This is addressing the more “mechanical” notes of your post, others might be better discussed in separate threads by topic:
1. giving -1 Spirit and Taint Tracker: in the new version, both options on the playbooks are active for -1 Spirit. Picking only one pressured the characters not nearly enough. I am hesitating though to make this a GM’s call rather than a mechanical trigger. Mechanical triggers are easier to spot, and clear, while a GM’s call can feel arbitrary, and it gives the GM yet another thing to track.
4. Heavy armor: yes, that’s definitely reduced in v.0.93 to 1-armor for light stuff (leather, lightish chainmail or partial armor) and 2-armor (heavy full armor). I am even wondering how to change the shield +1-armor into something more fictional and perhaps flexible in attack/defense, although I don’t want to introduce too many little crunchy mechanics for a single piece of gear.
I also want to look better into the numbers crunching for the Raider+veterans moves and see the extreme results; thanks for flagging that.
5. Advancements and XP: in v.0.93 after testing with all the XP boxes, I am going back to the original design that had 1 box per move. That was working better. In terms of Advancements, in any case, if someone plans to play 2 to 4 max 5 sessions (as a lot of groups do) I see no problem in going through almost all Advancements in a few sessions, to develop the characters at their full potential.
7. Roll to attack and roll for damage (inflict harm): well, that’s a design choice to remove HP and I hope it’s even better in v.0.93. (there will be some changes). Note that the manual has a rule for a single roll, though, to address exactly this. If you want to speed up things, you roll for example Engage In Battle (+Steel), and then you carry the dice result over to Inflict Harm (of course without the +Steel). Same for Suffer Harm: instead of rolling, you simply use the previous roll score.
8. Ceasars are in charge of the Iron Fist: if the campaign remains focused on the Iron Fist brotherhood, characters can become Magisters, then even become part of the small group that runs the mercenary company. This calls of course for some political intrigues, though decisions to make, and in general opens a gate to a “let’s change the history of this city/region” approach. It’s not spelled out mechanically, because it really depends on how the group played so far. If a character expressed interest or concerns on how the Iron Fist deals with problems, perhaps taking (or trying to take) an important role in the chain of command makes sense.
9. Size of the gang: makes sense, and in v.0.93 I am also probably going to make gangs ‘smaller’ also to give a better fictional sense to moves like “Last Stand” that hardly make sense in a 1 vs 20 situation.
It sounds like you guys are having fun, and that besides minor hiccups, there were no cases when the COJ machine actually halted with a disastrous sound of crashing mechanics 🙂 and that’s great to hear, for me!