Play Report 4

Campaign: Ecclesterium Exiles
Session: 1
Session Time: 4 Hours
System: Dungeon World
Perilous Encountered: 6
NPCs Encountered: 3
Fronts Visited: 2

New Side Story Characters

Here’s the thing, I really love running Dungeon World.  It’s honestly more fun than playing a character in DnD.  So, when I realized I was going to miss a weekend of gaming to a family visit, I was bummed… for about 10 seconds when I realized I could just ask my brother-in-lawses if they wanted to play a game.  A quick text, and we had our game scheduled. I ended up running for 4 of my favorite people in the world, and we had a blast!

That me in the top right.  In the bottom left in our Immolator, Paladin, and Assassin from left to right.

I landed on the idea of running the same setting that I have been running for my other games, but picking a new spot on the map, set a week before the moon turns blood red.  My game is turning into a living map style game.  Everything each player does to advance the world state can inform or challenge someone else future game.  The map for all players is being filled in by different parties at different sessions.  It’s a great way to make the most out of the prep I’ve already done, and it’s a DM style that matches my wacky, inconsistent, adult schedule.

DM Prep

In preparation for this side story, I printed out a large map of the country (seen above), since there was going to be overland travel, and I’ll want to use this map next week, when I run a game with friends at Gen Con.

I learned a lot from Walker’s thief game from last week, covered in play report 3.  The biggest take away was, “Fill environments with interesting stuff and make that interesting stuff difficult to bypass.”  So, I decided to make a point-crawl style dungeon.  No 5x5 grid, no map, just corridors and rooms corresponding to cardinal directions.

Discovering that I was going to be running a game for 4 people instead of the 2 I was expecting, I just doubled the amount of enemies, which wasn’t a great move, but we’ll talk about that in the GM wrap up section.

Play Report

Our story began with a quick character creation.  Our new heroes were agents of the Ecclesterium, operating out of the Cathadopolis, the capital city and religious center of the Norlands.  Church approved classes were chosen, and about a 30 minutes later, we had Eleanore the Bald Paladin, Yajna the Immolator of the Holy Fire, Elise the Sad Cleric, and Dalgren the Inquisition Assassin. They were summoned the chambers of the Bishopess of Leaugerview, who had an important task for her trusted friends.  They were to make haste to the Rockmourn Chapel in the mountains, two days to the south, and save an infant child who has a Church issued Death Warrant on his head.

Our Paladin was suspicious of the situation, and was liberally using her abilities to detect lies to pry more deeply into the statements of the Bishopess.  It turns out that this child, Ambrady, was abandoned by his mother, and his father is an angel.  A powerful sect within the Ecclesterium believes the existence of this child to be a threat, and will soon dispatch a team of Consecrators to kill him.  Young Ambrady won’t be safe anywhere within reach of the Church, and so must be found and taken out of the country.  The Bishopess further insures them that the fate of the world may well hang in the balance of this mission.

So, off they go, catching the road for faster travel.  After half a day’s march, they detect the rumble and dust cloud of a team of horses galloping back from the direction they had come.  Suspecting it might be the Consecrator team, they duck into the trees, except for Elise, who was fumbling to set up a tripwire.  The riders tore passed, then stopped.  They were 8 foot tall, gaunt, dressed in silver silk choir robes and eyeless steel helmets covering their faces, There were 8 of them.  The leader dismounted and sniffed the ground, like a wolf, over to Elise.

Dalgren throws a dagger into the giant rider’s chest, and Yajna ignites the rope to create a wall of flame to separate the Consecrators from the party, but the other helmeted figures leap through the flames for a confrontation anyway, burning, but registering no pain..  The Paladin, leaps out of the trees and commands the foul things to be gone, with the clouds parting to support her devine authority.  The Consectors screech and gallop down the road, heading in the direction of Rockmourn Chapel.

Our party marches on, reaching the village of Highchurch by nightfall.  After Dalgren poisons a few stablehands, the party makes off with for horses.  They suffer the penalties of neglecting sleep to make up for lost time.  It isn’t long that they find they are being tailed by a posse of villagers hunting for horse thieves.  Our heroes pull off the road to ride into the woods to evade their pursuers, but the Cleric and the Immolator are thrown from their mounts.  Their other party members snatch them up onto their horses and they escape capture.  They elected to camp and rest while the heat died down.

They hit the Chapel the next afternoon, finding the door knocked off its hinges.  A priest was clinging to life on the ground behind the lecturn.  Eleanore healed the priest by laying on hands, and he told them that while he tried to lock them out, the Consecrators eventually rammed in the door and began searching the catacombs for the child after sniffing out the scent of their prey.  Our heroes dreww their weapons and descended into the catacombs.

Mourners lay slain on the ground in front of grave markers, stabbed to death with many stiletto wounds.  The walked down the east corridor and heard gentle harping.  The Dalgren recalled tales of harping spiders that strum enchanted lamentations in dark places, and so they stuffed their ears with cloth, except for the Paladin, who was blessed with immunity to all enchantments.  At the end of the hall, the Paladin heard tippy tap of small metal points against stone ground as well as sniffing.  A battle ensued with a Consecrator, who seemed to be still searching for the child.  The vile giant was armed with a gauntlet with stiletto tipped fingers.  Some wounds were take and given, but in the end, the heroes won the fight.

The backtracked to catch another passage, which forked at a fountain of holy water under a fresco of the first Saint of the Norlands bringing the Ecclesterium to land a few hundred years ago.  This fountain also marked the end of the Ecclesterium section of the catacombs, the rest of the tombs are ancient pagan burials.  The clean and polished stone work gave way to crude, unshaped rocks with chizeled spiral patterns.

Dalgren’s torchlight caught the reflection of many sets of eyes in an open chamber.  Hairless, skinless apes, called Ohnobos, that groom the bodies of the dead for maggots.  Yajna, the Immolator, tried to frighten them off, but instead became the target of their territorial rage.  It was a quick fight, but our party took many minor wounds.

Next they came into a chamber with a stone table, piled high with a banquet of vat pickled python stuffed with  wrathfruit, earth cooked spider goats, and the twitch hands of grave robbers.  Witchqueen Cadaverine was attempting to dine with her beloved and belated friends in the ancient tomb, but complained that the Consecrators were causing too much of a ruckus.  She promised a favor if they would clear the catacombs of these beastly men.  They agreed to the terms.  Picking a path in the forked chamber, the proceeded onward into the darkness.

They found a new chamber, which was crawling with Consecrators, one of which was snatched up by an animated burial shroud and pulled into a tomb and silenced suddenly.  The Cleric caste a spell to detect for evil, and discovered that while the ghost moving the strangling shroud was evil, the Consecrators were not.  There was no time to debate philosophies of alignment, however, so our friends cut down the remaining Consecrators in the room, keeping a sharp eye out for ghosts.

Our heroes soon found themselves in a new chamber with the ticking of metal claws against the ground and a foul smelling fog covering the room a waist height.  Once again, the Cleric called upon her divine powers and purified the fog, which instantly peeled back and vanished.  This however did attract the attention of the Consecrators in the room.  After a few rounds of melee combat, the Cleric has the idea to enchant on of the beastly men’s helmets with a fear spell, which caused them to attack one another for a moment.  The helmet was torn off on of the Consecrators, and for the first time, they could see the face of one of these vicious killers. No eyes, no ears, and no tongue, the offending body parts had been removed to make sure that the Consecrators could see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. With dwindling HP, our heroes again prevailed, finishing off another pair of these pitiable wrenches.

They returned to the forking paths at the holy water fountain, and they drank from the fountain to gain a blessing, also filling some bottles with its restorative waters, but in so doing accidentally befouled it.  Entering the final room, the Immolator spots a Sun Eater Lamp burning over the door arch.  The flame had become twisted and deceased in this forsaken corner of the catacombs, and it ate Dalgren’s torch flame. They tried to extinguish it by throwing it into the fountain, but the fountain water turned to blood, and the fresco crumbled and cracked.  The Cleric re-sanctified the fountain, and the blessed water extinguished the flame.

When the heroes returned to the final chamber, there was an ambush waiting for them.  The last two of the Consecrators were waiting for them, and Immolator nearly fell in battle, but with the bravery and power of Eleanore, the Bald Paladin, they were victorious.

When they sought out Witchqueen Cadaverine’s favor, she reveal a passage way that she had concealed from the Consecrators, where she was hiding the child Ambrady and the midwife charged with his care.  The day was won, and the party made for a remote island to sequester the angelic child from any more assassins.

GM Wrap Up

All and all, the evening went very well.  This was the first game of Dungeon World for all of the players, and only my fourth time running it.  They all said they had a lot of fun, some saying it was much more enjoyable than games of Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, or Dungeon Crawl Classics.  The players all wanted to know more, they wanted to know what was going to happen next, what the angel baby was going to do, how long would their island hideaway remain a secret.  This made me feel very good.  As a DM, I see it as my job to make the gameworld so appealing and perilous that the players find themselves not just wanting to play again, but to be inquisitive about the gameworld and their fate in it.

My attempts to address the dungeon design I think worked very well, but next time I’m going to draw a simple map, maybe with tokens to add for the different rooms and their distinctive features.  I want to avoid revealing a specific space, like a D&D dungeon map, but something seemed lacking without a map of any kind.  The sense of discover was lost.

The combats were a bit duller than I wanted them to be.  As I mentioned earlier, when I found out we were having 4 players, I doubled the amount of Consecrators, and that cause the game to drag on a little bit.  I planned the harping spiders, the sun eater lamp, gasping fog, and strangling shroud to be elements that would spice up the combats with the Consecrators, but by that point in the night, the game was running later than I wanted.  So, the lesson is, be more creative to think of ways to adjust for more party member than just adding more baddies.  Action economy isn’t as paramount in Dungeon World as it is in D&D, so I’d like to take the chance to find a different answer to that particular problem.

The shared setting/ living map approach to these games is really fun! I found myself asking, “How can the world be saved from what has happen to the moon,” and instead of answering that question directly in the lore I answer it by letting that drive the design for a fun mission for a group of adventures to discover.  The last hope to return the world to the way it was has been saved… for the moment.

All this living map stuff has me thinking about how much fun it would be to run an evil character game that could introduce new problems for the hero characters to solve.  Could be interesting.

I have another game in this world I’ll be running with yet another group next weekend at Gen Con.  I already know what I’m planning for that one.  It fun because I’ve already created all these adventure hooks and fronts for Keaton’s game, so when I hear that I have a chance to run a game for a new group, a lot of the prep work has already been done!  More like, Done-geon World, am I right? ;P

That’s it for this play report.  See you next time!