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*unenthused

play report for MONOLITH BEYOND SPACE AND TIME!

What an interesting session!

Players were tasked by "The Duke of Burgundy" to figure out a mysterious valley that had appeared in the Duke's lands. The players travelled to the valley.

The valley was surrounded by rocky hills and contained a lush woodland with a pool of fog in the center. A forest unusual in the arid region of the Dukedom. Not so cautious, the players travelled past some rocky hills into the valley.

Within the valley: forest only, but they stumbled quickly across a single traveller. The traveller looks familiar to each player character; the traveller has features drawn from each one of them, he has No-hat Logan's haircut, Spackle's facial features, etc.

They engage in some hostile conversation before our heroes overwhelm the doppleganger with magic missles. They take all of the extra equipment the amalgam had; he had copies of all of their stuff.

They travel for a few hours more before realizing that they should have crossed the valley by now. One player character climbs a tree and sees infinite forest surrounding them in every direction. Clearly this is a spacially distorted forest. They decide to head further in, after backtracking a bit to see if they could find their way back (they can, their wagon wheels leave tracks).

They travel for 5 days inward into the green infinite forest. They find nothing but forest. They become aware of a strange power dynamic in the group; certain player characters can command other player characters in some kind of supernatural psychological hierarchy. They dont make much use of this weird power though.

Nothing appears to be happening in this giant empty valley. They retreat back out of the valley in an uneventful 6 days more travel. They come back after a quick restocking trip with supplies for a month's journey, selling the extra equipment gleaned from that weird guy they killed.

Returning back into the valley, prepared for a long empty journey, they immediately stumble into a nudist's commune. Several hundred beautiful people are engaged in extensive and continuous sex; and they are very friendly and inviting. The PCs decline.

They proceed past the commune to a wall of fog. They go in; at the point in the fog's depth where nothing is visible but fog, they are attacked.

Some invisible thing bites the party's pointman. In a panic, everyone retreats, regroups at the commune, and then proceeds into the fog again. A wizard PC is bit this time. They retreat out of the fog, try a little sexual experimentation that involves their supernatural psychological hierarchy, then leave the valley entirely. They send a report to The Duke of Burgundy and the adventure is concluded. Their reward: 2,000sp.

No XP is gained.

PLAY NOTES:

Genuinely a fun time, we were able to appreciate the module's distortions. The players were smart and were able to suss out the strangenesses, for instance they identified each PC's qualities in the amalgam/doppleganger.

THE DISTORTION OF SPACE: I rolled ASTRONOMICAL UNITS for the unit size of the valley the first time in, and then FEET the second time. The players appreciated the extreme distortion of travel because there was a very low chance of a random encounter: 1/6 per day. I rolled none the whole game, and thus the huge amounts of travel took little time to simulate.

The HIERARCHY distortion, which I rolled both times they went in, also provided an interesting distortion of the game space, though they only used it during the sexual experimentation.

In retrospect, I probably should have let the players come within viewing distance of the Monolith before having the Guardian bite them; seeing the Monolith beyond the fog would have been nice.

THEORY/REVIEW:
Each part of the module excells at distorting the game.

The elements of the Valley are sparse but well spaced. The distortions blend well, a little chaotically but not overwhelming. So much variation is possible!

Illustrating the visibility in the fog, the range of the Guardian's attacks, and the range of the Monolith's effects could be easily done with a simple diagram, it was a little hard for me to parse from the text.

I applaud Raggi for the effectiveness of these game elements. Good module, will run again, they'll see the Monolith next time I bet.

NEW REPORT-- PLAY BY POST

THE TOWER OF THE STARGAZER

The team enters after some hesitation. The lightning bolts that strike the outside of the tower are imposing.

Inside, it's more comfortable. A foyer and dining room. Some old wine in a cabinet.

One PC, Jonah, drinks some of this wine. It's spoiled, and Jonah gets sick...

Under the dining room is a storage room full of human bones. And next to it is a gruesome laboratory. The laboratory has a strange, magic elevator.

The elevator leads down to a treasure room. A puzzle involving forcefield and levers protects the treasure. The PCs fail to solve the puzzle. They leave this room.

The elevator takes them up. There they find the wizard. He is trapped in a salt ring in his own bedroom. He wants them to brush the salt aside.

Our heroes are hesitant, and soon the wizard loses his patience. However, inside the salt circle, the magus is impotent. Even his spells cannot penetrate the barrier.

So, the PCs snag a nearby gem (worth 5,000sp!) and, deeming this a good load, leave.

Jonah, however is worse by the minute, and has to be dragged back to the Inn. He worsens, seizes, and dies... a terribly spoiled wine.

I've got no plans to DM for the forseeable future, we're going to play Gloomhaven for a while

1 dead child = 2000 sp/lumes, that's a good value

rlly happy about this session

most of the group cancelled at last minute so I just came over to play video games

eventually we said fuck it lets play with 1 player only

The PC agrees to cut off his ear and sell it to cultists for information

He's using his sword for surgery... as he begins cutting I call in the Rapture, who quickly takes control. The Rapture pulls the sword out of the wound and begins to attack.

It swings at the watching hungry cultists. It hits and kills. The other PCs join the battle.

Soon the cultists are all dead. The Rapture leaves. The PCs have the run of the cultist's church.

Inside they find a deactivated magic portal. The Magic-User PC reactivates it. It leads to 1970's Chicago.

One PC goes thru the portal. We play out a week of homelessness, then a cop knocks out one of the PC's eyes. The PC slays the cop with his sword.

Looting the corpse, the PC picks up the cop's gun, bullets, flashlight, mace etc. Then he heads back to the portal. He makes it back thru the portal which deactivates.

Okay so now the PC has gun + bullets + flashlight, not to mention modern clothes, in the veins. We end the session there, a half hour of play.

tonight's game ended with unusual violence. we had to kick one player out of the group permanently. the cause of this I think had little to do with the role playing game text.

one player got drunk and angry, and shoulted "fuck off" at the top of his lungs in the face of another player. this, part of a pattern of drunken behavior... we kicked him out and good riddance.

no one was harmed. this is the guy who threatened me with a knife a couple weeks ago.

anyway the game: PCs are the slaves of knotsmen.  They have nothing but the sharp rocks they use to mine coal for their masters.

Immediately the party mugs their guard and steals the lantern. The knotsmen guard tho seemingly can't be killed in combat as supernatural luck intervenes.  The PCs flee deeper into the mine.

Then I ask the players to elect a guide... they refuse. I bring up that their lantern is running out of fuel. They decide to mine more coal for their lamp.

An interesting play interaction: per hour, they mined 1 lume if they pass a wisdom test. Proceeding thus they recieved 3 lumes after 2 hours of digging, netting a 1 lume profit for their burning lantern. I point out that they are covered in coal dust from slave-mining and they recieve 1d20 lumes each. 

Session ends here.

Ok, so pc's wanna summon a demon in the land of the dead:

to get sacrifices they set up a tent that says "free food", and the scam works bc everyone in the land of the dead wasn't doing much anyway.

C'ren rolls well and she snags a Throbbing-Striped Snake Demon that can cast Time Stop. Fantastic. She sets it loose on the city and soon the entire populace is under her control.

C'ren now has a army of Dead People. She comes to terms with Vecna; they agree to take over much of the world together. They gather the rest of Vecna's body parts pretty quickly (using demons and necromancy) and Vecna reassumes command. The Dead/Undead Army is now at full strength!

We elide a lot but essentially the player characters are now military leaders, close confidants of Vecna. For their first mission C'ren elects to return to the Veins of the Earth. Vecna declines to come but will teleport the party to the only known entry to the Veins: the Deep Carbon Observatory.

Supplies are drawn up, a skeletal force recruited to carry most of the load, and four/five Teleports later the party ends up back in Carrowmore. The villagers there are all creepy and talking about Grandma, but we move on...

Back up at the dam some salamander people have a little village that the party quickly massacres. Then the descent begins... They head into the Observatory and quickly find the enormous near-infinite chain which descends thru the abyss to the Veins. It's a week's climb down the chain, for which they have packed... They begin to climb.

An enormous white hand emerges from the dark and grabs the chain. C'ren sends her demon but the hand shakes the timesnake off; it falls into the abyss. The giant climbs onto the chain.

Things are not going well. The skeletons hold the giant off briefly while the party rappels down the chain. Erika the Magic-User is not quick and gets grabbed and is pulped.

C'ren is left alone scrambling down the endless chain. Skeletal forces falling screaming past her. Soon the chain vibrates and she can feel the giant on its approach. She casts Magic Missile as a last resort but it does little and the giant eats her alive.

general notes: time stop demon launched everyone into domain play... then they planned a new expedition, set out on it, and were tpk'd...  all in one session preddy good... ... all the characters respawn in the Land of the Dead.  we're gonna take a break for a while and play a Top Secret campaign

A CRUDE MAP:

A horribly racist statue is unveiled in the center of the city of the dead. Well C'ren has issues with this so she revs up her chainsaw and takes on 12 purple hooded people who put up the statue. She kills a few and then dies to their daggers.

She dies, she gets to ask God three questions, then she comes back to life... In the middle of the city of the dead, next to the statue. Hey, those purple hooded people she killed are back too! The combat continues...

..

Meanwhile Allan Spallan the Skeleton is searching for Vecna's Ribs along the coast. Howyaver Black Knights have appeared at regular intervals along the beach; placed there by a local undead warlord name of Izzank. Allan has to go and get an appointment in the Necropolis if he wants permission to beachcomb...

Some conversation is had between Allan and Vecna's head... apparently all skeletons are driven to commit evil and it is only by Vecna's grace that they remain civilized at all... Vecna lost all his body parts in a card game with "the police"... sounds fake but ok...
..

C'ren and gang give up the combat over the racist statue. God has told C'ren that the most amount of gold locally is in Vecna's Necropolis, so they decide to explore the city's sewers where a secret passage into the Necropolis can be found.

In the sewers: a live rat or two, a chest of drawers full of valuable clothes, a horrible clanking animate pile of iron gates, a slippery and ghost-filled path down to the Hollow City, and finally, the child gang who rules the sewers. The kids, staying beyond the party's light, agree to guide the party to the Necropolis's secret entrance for some coin.

..

Up above, Allan the Skeleton is permitted into the Necropolis by its undead guards. The Necropolis is a sprawling city made of green glass, the headquarters of Vecna's undead forces. Allan waits a few days to get an appointment with a clerk to talk about beach-combing rights but is ultimately turned down; Allan cant reveal his mission, since Vecna's head wants to keep a low profile... Allan leaves, to go meet up with the rest of the party...

..

The sewer children lead C'ren and co over to a crack in a sewer wall which leads to the necropolis. Through the crack in the wall the party can hear a guard patrolling. They call the guard over and have a pretty awkward exchange; eventually the guard's superiors are summoned. There's some noncombat with C'ren holding up her chainsaw in the crack and a bunch of skeletons yelling. Eventually the party leaves.

They meet up with Allan Spallan and come back to the sewer/necropolis crack and negotiate with Vecna's head. Vecna wants to keep a low profile but he's willing to command a few guards if that's what the party needs. All of the guard skeletons of the Necropolis love Vecna so they gleefully go get a bag of gold for the party-- 10,000gp. (we're on the gp standard, not the sp standard -ed) Vecna also retrieves his shins leg bones and feet which were stored in the Necropolis, so he's now a little walking skull with legs. Problem solved, no need to go in the dungeon at-all.

Everyone goes up a level from the gold-getting.

PLAY NOTES: you can tell there was a pretty big swerve at the end. Sometimes LOTFP feels like the players trying a bunch of wacky stuff until they hit on something. I'm having trouble roleplaying Vecna seriously, he's pretty jovial for a Lich.

Troika's influence DEFINITELY still being felt in this game, lots of uhh easy changes in fortune, cosmic strangeness. Also VEINS OF THE EARTH is influencing the game, helping me put together the sewer tunnels, the starvation, I'm using my d100 list of veins interstices to get into/out of the sewers, plus C'ren's experience seems immediately applicable.

Chet is playing Allan Spallan the Skeleton. Chet is having an interesting time because he's carrying around a talking head which he must obey absolutely. Chet loves to roleplay with strange rules so this I think tickles him pretty good.

A city of starving people seems to be recurrent in my games. ok so the party is trying to cross a desert.

On the journey:
-A skeleton carrying the head of his master Vecna
-a vampire with her unholywater-soaked parasol.
-John's wizard.

The desert: the Now-Drained Sea of the Dead.

They make if four days in the desert, lost half the time. A strange creature appears over a hill. A moving blob of blood. It means to chase them.

The bag of blood (ironically) slays the vampire. Then it chases and kills John's wizard. John's wizard should have prepared Magic Missle instead of Shield, we all chide.

The party's skeleton played dead and survived. The vampire turned into a chess piece for a while but got better. They, two, continue the journey.

A dwarf joins the party. The vampire wants to drink the dwarf's blood; she's getting really hungry. The dwarf declines.

A few days of travel pass. They make a detour around a encampment of undead soldiers. The vampire is starting to get really hungry. She is going to go insane with bloodlust. To spare violence the dwarf offers her blood. The vampire unable to stop sucks all the blood out of the dwarf who turns into a vampire.

There's two vampire PCs now. Trouble is, they have at least 6 days more of travel left, and they're outta blood. The skeleton who doesn't need to eat or drink or sleep is o.k. Actually none of them need to sleep so they walk day and night, the two vamps crowded under a parasol.

Time passes, no blood is found, so the vampires go insane. They're stored in a sack, transformed into writhing swarms of scorpions. The skeleton carries the sack, alone in the drained undead sea.

Eventually the skeleton makes it to the foetal shores of the Land of the Dead. John's wizard, Dead, is there to greet him. There they start looking for Vecna's ribs....... they search among crags of aborted bones.

*     *      *

Searching the foetal beach, John's wizard finds one of Vecna's Ribs. He hides it from the skeleton. Then the wizard finds another rib, so he flees to the nearby City of the Dead.

In the City of the Dead:

most of the starving people still have their dignity,
but some don't.
People speak in fervid tones of a general movement,
but they are without hope.
Most of the proper priests identify it as purgatory.

No one has food, I have a d100 city encounters table. There's competing funerals (for the Dead who hope to die again, properly), hand grenades on sale, spies. The competing funerals turn into a general brawl. C'ren, our wizard of the Veins Campaign (dedicated readers will recognize her from Tales of Insanity vol 3554: http://test.lotfp.com/RPG/discussion/to … y-reports/), shows up to the brawl. She chops some people up with her chainsaw; she bites a chunk off an arm. That's food right there.

Anyway so the skeleton spends a week searching the beach for Vecna's bones and finds some. C'ren and John's Wizard and the dwarf decide to go into the nearby Necropolis, Vecna's dungeon of despair.

PLAY NOTES:

We had a rule where since it's the City of the Dead anyone could bring back any dead character. Thus C'ren is, canonically, back. Dying means you lose 1 CON permanently and end up in the City of the Dead. It's like in "Wristcutters".

The blood demon was rolled randomly (using ranaman's lotfp summon spell generator-ed) so it's a genuine irony.

I'm having the time of my life. Lots of "power levers", like when the vampire drained the dwarf she got a level of Dwarf, but she ran out of blood and went insane. Power levers = mechanics that can change your fortune. LOTFP is a good battleground for these and it was like vampirism vs. desert.

Most of this was done with skill checks/ time tracking / random encounter tables. Like finding a way thru the desert? Everyone make a bushcraft check, anyone succeed? No, you only get a half day's of progress. Then I roll to see if I get a 1, if I do it's a random encounter. I get a 3, so no encounter, so next day, mark off a ration, everyone roll bushcraft... it's a 12 day journey.

(even ruling that they all get to roll bushcraft is generous, shoulda made them elect someone...)

That being said for the skeleton's players it was a bit of a strain, rolling d6s over and over again, waiting to progress. Then again they were probably bored because they weren't starving.

ok ran death frost doom for my dnd group on an off week

they snuck past Zeke, made their way thru the graveyard, checked out the cabin's big book, found the trapdoor, went down, ended up in the chapel. H's character grabs the dagger, is cursed, whatever. D with the help of his goblin friends starts dissembling a big copper door in order to tow it through the trapdoor and down the mountain.

O plays the organ, they and R make their save vs. death when yellow mold sprays out. Then there's the matter of the tooth-door. Eventually D summons a wolf and knocks out one of its teeth and drops it in the basin. This opens the door.

They raid one of the crypts, grab the manual of flesh golemry, grab the translating eyepiece, make it near the singing plant-thing. At this point, the begin battle with the singing plant thing. However, D casts "wind wall" to effectively end the combat; D defends all monsters as a character trait.

After this point O casts "gaseous form" and descends into the pit the plant creature emergeth from. Well I warn them that there's a powerful intake and outake of air blowing out through the pit and that'll effect their ability to traverse it, but I'm a softie and it comes to nothing. D manages to dissemble the copper door and get it out of the cabin. Everyone else gets bored and leaves.

Gaseous O descends all the way down into the giant's nose. She walks around, finds some booger-ruins. A little while later she stumbles upon the city of Vornheim. We elide the action a little; she talks to some locals and arranges for travel back to her home base. I say "after many adventures and travails you end up back home", the cool part is its implied that she has to take a boat from inside the giant and that like works somehow? and O jumps in and talks about a romance with a cabin-boy (actually a cabin-girl in disguise) to fill out the genre feel here.

Anyway back in civilization D is building a flesh golem out of summoned deer and wolves. After C, a dragonborn, shocks the golem with lightning to give it life 19 spectres and wraiths attack and kill D before he can do anything. that's all she wrote

END OF THE CAMPAIGN

ok so: c'ren and her cult and the local warlord Izumi and the other PC's and Izumi's last few men are all hiding out in a bar. Their former base, a nearby inn, has been raided by the mushroom kingdom's holy guards/ kannushi (priests).

C'ren decides to storm the Inn and reclaim it! She sends 13 of her cultists, some of Izumi's men, her demon, and herself. This party easily slaughters the contingent of 7 holy guards and 3 Kannushi at the Inn. Soon after the battle, however, the local Daimyos surround the Inn with their forces. In addition, there's a host of Kannushi present.

What follows: C'ren tries to convince the crowd to join her, she has infinite food, but the Kannushi cast Enthrall and control the crowd. Baba, a PC, fires a bolt at a priest and a battle ensues: many cultists die, and one of Izumi's lieutenants, but ultimately C'ren and her demon kill a Kannushi and drive off the aggressors.

There is some peace as both sides regroup. Baba sneaks out with a bag of troll meat, gets caught by some Holy Guards. He bribes them with half the troll meat. Then he meets up with some Miko (servants of the priest) friends of his and gives them the rest of the troll meat. This all in an attempt to disrupt the sleep of the priests by giving their servants infectious meat.

Anyway, after some sleep, C'ren disbands the cult. Izumi and his lieutenants flee the city. C'ren and the PCs disguise themselves as meat merchants and hide their electric demon in a cart. As they leave the Inn they're detained by some holy guards. C'ren sends her demon into battle and flees with the PC's. They find an empty house, oh wait there's an old man in it, they kill him.

They make a plan: raid the jail to recover Papi + his confiscated treasure. They charge towards the jail, which is the barracks of the holy guards! Their demon meets up halfway there. As they approach they see 8 holy guards with spears, 5 with crossbows, and some kannushi are guarding near the front of the barracks... so the PC's run in the barrack's back entrance.

Inside the barracks, there's Papi in a cell. C'ren chainsaws the lock and Baba blockades the front door with a table. Papi says, the money isn't here probably. Then the holy guards burst in through the front door! C'ren casts magic missle, killing a guard, but the other guards swarm in. They seem magically protected, as the demon can't apprach them! They all stab C'ren- she dies. Her demon goes wild! Everyone else flees.

we agree to end the campaign and switch to a different roleplaying system, namely Troika!