Smoke Kisses Sky - Session 2 Report: In Which I Vent

Last wednesday I ran the second session of Smoke Kisses Sky and I had a much more difficult time with it. I think it went well enough from the player's end, but I came away from it unsatisfied. Gloomy person that I am I might not have written up this report at all, if not for an encouraging comment on the last post. Therefor I am going to make a post, but a lot of it is going to be complaining about how I ran this session, you have been warned.

The session picked up where we left off, in the basement of the old apothecary, where everyone encountered the oracle Distel. I quickly established that everyone feels a sense of instintual fear, and that this creature can deal damage to max HP, however it's currently non-hostile. Matilda managed to navigate throught a conversation with it without aggravating the shade, learned some rambled clues about what is going on, but the ever unlucky Rosemary recieved an omen that she'd be struck by lightning. Then a huge part of the session was spent grappling with blood vines before they were methodically taken care of with Dame's vorpal shears and some shears found in the cellar. This was a major paint point for me, more on this later. With the blood vines cleared away, an old alchemical lab was uncovered with a corpse in the center of the vines whose dried blood is bright red. I mentioned that Matilda as an alchemist would know that this blood is powerful and she could use the heart as an air reagent, however this would negatively effect her reputation with her followers, so she decided not to desecrate the body. From the alchemical lab they looted several books and unidentified alchemical supplies, most notable a ciphered alchemical recipe book. Then avoiding the room where Distel resides, they went into a boarded up room and found the Sphinx of Black Quarts. Realsing it was magical and powerful but unable to read the description, they headed back to the town, had a nice sauna, listened to the Glazier explain the meaning of sphinxes a little and made plans to hunt the Beast of Yelenin the next morning.

Grappling

I don't like how I ran grappling the blood vines. I attempted to use the g24 grappling rules for this, but ran into the problem that most of the rules do not apply when one of the opponants is a pile of vines spread across the room. This resulted in a lot of opposed Might checks that I don't think were clear in thier exact consequence and not a lot of interaction with the fiction. Which meant that I was very hesitant to inflict segnificant consequences for anything that happened, and it sorta fell flat. The information I gave for running the blood vines turned out to be insufficent. I think I either should have had more of a mechanical backing or taken a more fiction first approach. 

Mental Load

The party has four npc followers and I don't have the bandwith of having them all act in a way that I feel is "in character" becouse that would just devolve in me playing a game with myself while the player sits there and watches as Dame the Vivisector charges into a fight. I think that will need to be changed somewhat. It doesn't help that I consistantly forget various details. Like at the start of the session I said "You have a set of keys from the corpse upstairs, becouse I forgot to say that they were lying on the ground in plain view at the time." Which I think is fine but I feel embarressed about. Also in the middle of the session I had to change Fatigue from "put X to disable a class feature or skill" to "takes an inventory slot" on account of how the companions do not have class features or skills listed, becouse I don't want to track those on top of everything else. I also didn't have the bandwith to do anything intresting with daemons and vices, which I find a bit dissapointing.

Conviction and Experince

At the end of this session, Matilda has leveled up without ever firing her gun, which I think both of us are a little dissapointed by. I think this might largely be my fault for how I glued together adventures. I don't think I like the experince triggers in Hilander's Houserules, at least not in this campaign. I've written about experince triggers before, and I am of the opinon that those mechanics are at thier best where they are used to encourage you to do fun dramatic things. Hilander's experince triggers are mostly sensible, and do not really serve that purpose. The except is the trigger based off of Conviction which has yet to be hit, becouse Alice has not been very mechanically minded about this game. It doesn't feel like it's really serving it's purpose. There is also currently an elephant in the room which is that I don't know how or when I want the npc followers to progress.

Conclusions

I can ramble could bring up countless subjects. However here are some take aways from writing this amount of thoughts out. I think the take away is that I need to prep smarter, so that improvisation doesn't feel bad. I should maybe cut down the amount of things I need to keep track of. Also I need to figure out what kind of game I actually want to run and what kind of game Alice wants to play. Currently she is a pretty quiet player and it'd be unsustainable if the game is mostly me talking at her.

Smokes Kisses Sky - Session 1 Report: Welcome to the Marsh

Yesterday I ran the first session of Smoke Kisses Sky, a duet campaign I’m running for a friend in the physical world. You know who you are please don’t read any further and spoil yourself on what was going on behind the curtain. Let’s call her Alice in this post, which is not her real name buy beats calling her “my friend” or “the player”.

In proper GLOG fashion it’s stitched together from many different pieces, run on Hilander’s House Rules, except with G24 weapons categories. Alice is playing firstGokun’s Gun Shepherd but also knows Low Alchemy. It is set under the Shadow of Glory, but also along the Jabberwocky river (from the hit yet-unreleased community zine the char3terie). Also it uses doggerland vices and daemons.

I wanted to do a narrative retelling of the session and have two drafts of this post where I attempted to do so, but I have kinda given up on that. It was a fun session and a successfully eased both the character and player into an unfamiliar world, but not one that's easy to retell. It involved a lot of exposition that was dynamic as a conversation, but I haven’t found a good way to translate it into text (a better writer might be able to, but not me as I am now). So instead I’m going to talk about what parts of the session I want to talk about.

As a brief overview, the Gun Shepherd Seo-Yun Matilda arrives in a small town of Yelenin that has been besieged by a terrible beast, hitching a ride on a steamboat owned by a hunter to come here to hunt the thing. The first thing she sees is a ritualized duel, during which she talks with a friendly gnome who explains who all the people are and why everyone around here is wearing face paint. The duel concludes in a stalemate, and in the evening she eats dinner at the local tavern/gambling den/temple, where she hears rumors, learns more about who the local important people are and joins forces with other shady characters here to hunt the beast, one of which helps her get her own face paint. Then in the morning she travels through the swamp with her new companions to the abandoned apothecary half a day’s walk out of town. On the way there they encounter a weird person trying to sell them old junk. Arriving at the cabin they do some classic dungeon exploration, one of the companions has her arm possessed, and the weird person threatens and gets its head instantly beheaded. The session ends with a different monster poking out its head through a hole in the wall.

Arrows in your Quiver

In this session I had a specific objective outside just running a good game. That objective was to organically introduce and teach the four customs I outlined in my last post.

The custom I feel that I conveyed the best was Painted Faces, and it was also the one we spent the most time exploring. At one point Alice asked what the face paint of one of the character’s was after I forgot to introduce it when they first appeared, and she commented about how useful it was in post session discussion. Both of which I’m needlessly happy with.

The second best communicated custom was Generosity which I managed to set up as a little mystery. In the tavern I introduced the Father as a petty tyrant who went out his way to serve food to everyone himself. Later when I explained how Generosity works, Alice had an “aha” moment when she understood how the people around here are being extorted.

The Law of Blades was introduced with the duel, but took a back seat. Which I think makes sense because it’s not a custom she immediately needs to understand to meaningfully interact with the setting. It’s something that would become more important the closer you get to domain play and the campaign isn’t there yet.

Sauna Speech was not mentioned at all, and the importance of saunas is only hinted at here and there. I didn’t bring it up at all because Sauna Speech is something that will come up naturally during post-adventure downtime and after Alice has familiarized herself with the characters.

Lesson on Characterisation

The Beast of Yelenin is an adventure with 10 npcs, and I added 4 more on top in my prep to add characters relevant to the setting, plus one more gnomish farmer was invented in play. All of them got introduced, but a few stood out. The two characters who intrigued Alice the most was the Glazier, one of the priests I invented to represent the element of Crystal. He immediately grabbed her attention because he’s a skeleton with cracks repaired with gold like with Kintsugi and was destainful of everyone. The second was Dame the Vivisector who has the cool factor of being a huge knight who talks to her enormous iridescent shears. The thing these two share is that they paint evocative images in your mind. I wasn’t able to find the post but Bad Doctor had written once about describing evocative scenes with specific details. I think I understand how to do that more now. Next session I think I’ll be able to bring a little more sauce to the characters who were bland this session. Which actually includes the marsh, since at the time I was trying to sort out overland travel procedures.

Also I'm fond of the bandit Bellum even thought he hasn't had any particularly noteworthy moments yet. He's ended up just being a friendly and easy going guy.

Poor Rosemary

One of the characters who became more interesting during play was Rosemary, one of the hunters attracted by the bounty, who is also a gun-user and a foreigner. One of the encounters was someone getting possessed, and this threat has been well established beforehand with most npcs commenting to Matilda to get her face painted. So during the exploration of the cabin the dice decided that someone’s arm was going to be possessed by Dogsbody whose vice is Poor Hygiene. At first I was looking over what everyone’s Faces depicted to decide which one Dogsbody liked the most, until I remembered that I completely forgot about Rosemary and how Faceless she is, so she got possessed. There was a moment of tension where Alice wasn’t sure what was going to happen next, then Rosemary started picking her nose. Alice is yet to be told who Dogsbody is or what his deal is, she only knows that Rosemary is possessed. Later when combat starts in the cellar, Rosemary has to fight her arm that is trying to shove expired jam in her mouth. This is all pretty funny and I think firstGokun has nailed it with these rules. They add a good amount of chaos to the proceedings.

Unfortunate Mettie

The cabin is from my Old Apothecary adventure, which I placed outside of Yelenin since it’s an adventure I’ve wanted to run for a bit. Both times she was encountered the dice decided she would show up as a devilishly handsome business man, and I don’t think I liked how I played that out. I am somewhat tempted to replace that option in her shapeshifting table with something else because the encounter of her trying to sell a rusty old kettle turned out kinda weak. Either way the second time she was encountered was when the party was rummaging in the cellar. Mettie came down the stairs and started yelling at the party to leave, and extending her neck and arms unnaturally. Alice’s character Matilda asked if the it is the beast, to which Mettie responded with “Yes!” hoping to scare them. I forgot which one of us realised it first, but we both realised that Dame the Vivisector would immediately attack Mettie because of how giddy she has been about the hunt she has been. So then I spend some time pulling up the rules for combat, we roll initiative, I figure out what everyone’s HP total is, then Dame kills Mettie with a single snicker-snak of her shears. I think I could have played Mettie a bit more intelligently, but it is what it is. Specifically I should have had her attempt to appear in different forms to try and scare away the party on the way to the cabin, and probably had her whisper into Matilda’s ears to leave while invisible instead of walking straight into the arms of a 7ft tall knight.

Guns

There is an interesting consequence from how Alice is playing a Gun Shepherd, which is that I had to change firearms to fit the class’s assumptions. The 5 muskets the Family had were changed to be fire lances, which functioned like the Gun Shepherd’s gun but with one less damage die unable to be reloaded in combat. The Son’s pistol was replaced with a long bow, because I just watched Princess Mononoke where bows are cool. The Son’s Wife’s blunderbuss was replaced with a smoke bomb, because I think that fits her character. Rosemary’s musket went unchanged and she has changed to be a Gun Shepherd herself. Tuesday’s pistols are actually upgraded to modern pistols and are specified to be rare ancient artifacts not reproducible in the modern day. Finally the canon also went unchanged.

Glogmas: Argu the Alchemist (Dungeon Merchant)

Crawling through the dungeon you meet a strange dwarf with stone grey skin and unnerving white eyes. He calls himself Argu the Alchemist, but knows nothing of the art. He will trade information for information. Tell him about a monster, plant or danger in the dungeon and he will tell you something equally useful that he knows. However what he is really seeking is corpses, rare plants or strange minerals, for that he will give you his wares. He smells funky.

For each unusual sample he will provide one dose of the following. If it becomes important how much he has stocked he has 2d6 of each item.

• A Wineskin of Ethanol. Well, it looks like a wineskin anyway.
• Lump of Beeswax. Enough for three candles, and much more white than normal.
• A Wineskin of Caffeine. Not coffee, not tea, straight caffeine.
• Immune Booster. As popular in the Barony, except packaged in seamless wax paper.
• A Wineskin of Oil. You can’t tell if it’s plant oil or animal fat.
• Dose of a Psychoactive or Psychedelic. In squishy little balls you're supposed to pop into your mouth.
• Dose of Quick Weakening or Knockout Poison. Do not ask how he gets it and he won’t ask why you need it. Very simple, very discrete.
• Dose of Antidote. For the poisons above specifically.

For each unique sample he will provide the following. If it becomes important how much he has stocked he has 1d6 of each item.

• A dose of Curative, or three doses of either Prophylactics or Pain Killers. Again, like they do it in the Barony except for the packaging.
• Dose of Quick or Slow Lethal Poison. Very simple, very discreet.
• Dose of Antidote. For the poisons above specifically.
• Bolt of Spider Silk. A very fine textile.
• Wineskin of Delicious Syrup, Slugslick Grease or Wedweb Glue. Function as the alchemical formula with Reagent power of one. Argu insists that he knows how thier made.
• Wineskin of Healing. Restores d6 HP when drunk.
• A combination of ten of the unusual options.

For each one of a kind sample he will provide the following. If it becomes important how much he has stocked he has 1d3 of each item.

• Wineskin of Great Petard. As the alchemical formula, with a Reagent power of five. None of these are really wineskins, but you're not sure what else to call them.
• Dose of Perfect Antidote. Give him a sample of a poison 10 minutes unobserved and he will return haggard and holding a small grain that will cure that poison when swallowed. Physically he’s only capable of doing this once every 24 hours.
• Dose of Quick Lethal Poison. I am sure we understand each other.
• Dose of Antidote. For the poison above specifically.
• A combination of ten of the unique options.

When you show Argu a one of a kind sample, his eyes will go wide and it will become clear that he would do anything to acquire it. If you reject his initial offer, make a reaction roll. On a positive result, he’ll throw in another item, on a negative result he turns to threats or violence. Speaking of which.

Argu is a Derro half-folk bloom with all that entails. “He” has stats as an 4 HD dwarf in medium armour, with a billhook and a large amount of fungal “wood” throwing darts “he” can poison at a moment’s notice. By nature Argu is not a violent (fun)guy, so if violence breaks out, this Derro prefers to make distance, poison a target and renter negotiations offering the antidote. Will use syrup, grease or glue to make a quick escape if he’s overwhelmed or a Petard if things are really desperate.


Merry Glogmas to Ember from the Creature Cavern! I don’t know how much adapting Argu would need to be fit into your setting, but I think I might use the guy sometime myself. Only difference is I'd make him a soupborn, which are in a lot of ways similar to your half-folk. Also, I think I may have done a little too much crosslinking in this post. Also I know that following the logic of the post, the wierdness of Argu's wares shouldn't be this obvious, but rpgs aren't a medium in which handle subtly well and the overuse of "wineskin" is funny.