Sunrise Generation - Session 2 Play Report
We've had the 2nd session of the Sunrise Generation, this time joined by Kirko playing Piletta (She/Her), a wandering healer with a strong moral side, and Ags playing Giallo (He/Him), a disgraced duelist and gambler who loves fighting.
We started on February 23rd of the 19th year of the reign of His Royal Highness, the King Mustial. It is a cool, overcast day on Orange, the postal town outside of Sorelois.
Cleft couldn't join us at the start of the session, but he gave us his plan, which worked like clockwork:
He brought 2 people to pose as skeletons and convince them that the Skeleton Lord had fleshed them;
Once convinced, Cleft brought them back west, to the edge of the farmland, and told them to face west and meditate;
Once they did that, Cleft and his two partners in crime skedaddled away back to orange;
This all took 2 watches.
- DM Commentary: I thought of making this plan less of a foregone conclusion, but since Cleft wouldn't be present and the skeletons really are that stupid, I decided to leave them there as a fixture to come back in the future; much like the priest-cum-necromancer.
Albane, their 2 dogs, Giallo, his porter Coleslaw, Piletta, her still-to-be-named llama, and the 6 merchants who were mistreated by the skellingtons all went back to the temple. They negotiated a bit about money and each got 6 gold coins, with 6 more to be given once the business had been concluded.
At the footstep of the temple, they saw a strange, caterpillar-like shadow 2 meters long pass in the dark, look in their direction, and keep moving, which prompted a brief discussion about marching orders.
- DM Commentary: This was actually a random encounter but the reaction roll was neutral, so I decided to just give a brief glimpse of the bastard. This is a very dangerous monster and I didn't want to start the session with a fight.
Going in, they went to the opposite direction that the monster did and peeked inside a room, finding a huge spider sleeping in there. The party immediately closed the door and put some debris in front of it just to trip anything that came out.
There was a corridor going north with 3 doors at the end, so they went down it. 3 capybara-sized rats showed up from the left passage, pissed as hell, and started making mention that they'd attack. Since it was Albane at the head of the column, who can't fight for shit, they started making noise to intimidate the rats.
I allowed it, rolled an extra encounter roll but nothing showed up, and the rats fled on the passage to the right.
The party found out that the northern door lead out from the veranda; the passage to the left lead to a garbage dump with 5 other huge rodents gnawing on rotten food and too chill to bother with them (neutral reaction roll again), and the passage to the right led to the rice wine-soaked main prayer hall, where the skeletons had hidden their loot.
- DM Commentary: I also described that there were no other doors that went out of this room, except the ones to the tower adjoining the prayer hall, and the rats weren't here or there either because I forgot about them, so where did they go? I'd like to think that they found a doorway into a strange new world and are the stars of a different RPG.
Amongst the merchant's merchandise there were 10 tiny gems which Albane and Giallo elected to swipe, and a ton of other stuff that they preferred not to lift either because of logistics or because it would be too noticeable if it were gone.
While they were sorting their stuff, a skeletal hand was seen spidering around the beams of the temple, looking for its owner.
The party decided to go up the stairs to the tower and found nothing much there except some weird symbols that Piletta wisely wrote down; she's the only one that can read or write from the bunch. Albane recovered their grappling hook and rope, and they climbed down from the tower. The same skeleton hand was seen making its way up the tower instead.
The party then went outside and circled around the temple to tell the merchants that the coast was clear, and on the way they found a strange hole covered with detritus - mostly garbage from the skeletons and grass. At this point they were all believing the inhabitants of the temple to be spiders, and this would probably be their nest or something.
The merchants clearly didn't care, so the party decided to prioritize their mission and grab the shit and run.
The merchants ended up being very noisy. Giallo mustered his years of marshaling men around to keep them quick, and Albane and Piletta tried to urge them to be quiet, but there's a limit to how few noise a bunch of guys carrying crates and jingling coins can make on a hard wood floor.
This took 2 turns - I was using 5-minute dungeon turns instead of 10-minute ones because the scale of the dungeon was 5 feet - and I made 2 encounter rolls for each. Only the last one produced an encounter: the caterpillar shadow thing was back.
While the merchants grabbed their stuff, Albane stood guard on the veranda, looking down the corridor (which was 55 feet long), and that's exactly from where the monster came. He saw weird tentacles and mandibles instead of a face spreading from a caterpillar-like body and immediately urged everyone to run. This gave Piletta and the merchants time to run a bit more, but the caterpillar thing was just as fast as them and was fast approaching.
Albane threw an oil flask in the middle of the corridor and Giallo pulled them back with his sword between them and the monster. Albane tried throwing a knife but to no effect.
As Piletta and the merchants got outside, the caterpillar-thing reached the oil. Albane expected the oil to make it harder for the monster to walk, but - surprise - it started climbing and walking on the walls instead!
Giallo couldn't let this happen, so he dashed sword in hand and, with a war cry, unleashed a powerful blow against the thing's head, throwing it back on the floor and covering it in oil.
- DM Commentary: Giallo got 1 Special Effect here because the monster failed their Evasion roll, and asked me if it was cool to "Trip" the monster into the ground even though it wasn't available to his weapon. I said yes and allowed it to happen, but I had totally forgotten that this could be resisted by Brawn.
The monster rolled itself back on its feet and Giallo yelled "FIRE!", at which point Albane threw their lit lantern onto the oil and caused the corridor to rapidly erupt into a conflagration.
- DM Commentary: I thought about asking for a roll here but I figured that it was kinda harder for Albane not to hit something flammable than otherwise. The whole temple was dry as fuck wood in the middle of a savannah after all.
The monster, now on fire, started thrashing around, but Giallo and Albane managed to run away as the entire temple started caving in. The merchants grabbed their stuff and fled the scene as quickly as possible, but the party climbed up to the hill and sat down to watch the burning building, presumably while telling stories about their youth or something.
While they watched, a huge hand emerged from the hole they had previously failed to investigate. It was stoney and tree-like and it gave a huge cry that echoed through the savannah as its owner died. The party decided not to poke around the embers and went back to Orange.
There they met up with Cleft (who was just joining us), got the rest of their payment, and tried not to think too hard about the death of whatever was under the temple or the skeletons sitting somewhere out west. They had to go back to Sorelois to sell their gemstones, but Albane and Piletta - both having little Constitution - got very tired on the way.
As the sun went down on the overcast sky and very black night crept in, they found themselves back in farmland territory, in sight of the Sun Inn and Broggle Hill which they had visited last session. The farmers seemed to be going back to their homes in very concerned faces, and the sun was setting right at the edge of the horizon.
The party was talking about staying at the Sun Inn when they noticed a strange man cresting a nearby hill, the sun on his back. He was wearing unfamiliar clothes, was very tall, had darker skin that is common around this region, and had very long hair and beard which obscured his face. He swayed as he walked, shifting his weight from one side to the other and holding a strange longsword in one hand.
DM Commentary: That's right: I rolled snake eyes on the reaction roll lol. Until this point I was using a hex-dependent random encounter table, so I roll for an encounter on the hex which can give an encounter from this hex, from an adjacent hex, a wanderer, or a vignette. In this case it's from an adjacent hex, so I also rolled quantity and reaction.
This is a very stupid way of doing encounter rolls. My goal was to avoid nested rolls and have everything on one table, but I ended up creating 6 tables instead like a goon, and it takes a lot longer to crosscheck my hexes and the encounter available on each of them than it takes to just check the next table.
Piletta wanted to hide, but Giallo and Cleft thought it best to go right up to the thing and investigate.
At this point I asked for Initiatives and that put them immediately on edge.
Albane got the initiative and asked the man if he was feeling fine, which prompted him to bug his eyes out and lash out against Cleft; who thankfully was wearing some armoured sleeves barely disguised under his vest, but the blow was powerful enough to pierce the armour and impale his arm.
In his turn, Cleft chose to hold the sword of the man in place so he couldn't bring it back and yelled for Giallo to hit him, which he did.
The man obviously couldn't parry, so his choice was to either drop the weapon and Evade out of the way of Giallo's cut, or stay there and take it. He decided to play chicken with a duelist and lost.
Giallo got a very powerful cut directly on the man's neck, which would have likely killed a lesser person, but it provoked him only to dazedly release his sword and start mumbling in a strange version of their language about how he "shouldn't be here".
Albane, tired as they were, got their chain out and mobbed the guy, managing to entangle it around his abdomen. The man failed to Evade and so went to the ground hard, lifting up his hand and yelling for them to stop.
Cleft, who has a mystical sense of honour with some internal coherence, agreed, made a signal for Giallo to stop attacking him, and offered the man a hand up.
The man started screaming and screaming, retracting his arms into him and provoking the party to step back a bit. In the blink of an eye, he seemed to transform himself into a huge anaconda-like serpent that slithered away into the night and out into the savannah.
The party decided not to pursue it, and so we ended the session, electing to skip a week for the next session.
DM Shop Talk
This was a lot more action-oriented than the last session, and while I thought it was fun, it also exposed how little I actually remember from Mythras. Combat is a bit slower than "I attack him, oh I miss", but it's more rewarding in a way.
The only part I think it's unsustainable for me in the long term is the way I was making statblocks for the enemies (this last encounter I didn't have prepped, for instance, and went entirely on guesswork, which left me unsatisfied) and the Action Point economy.
The AP economy I can make work. It's just cycling through people, but it does require some overt delimitations of what is and isn't a combat round, when a cycle ends, etc, and that's not how I usually run combat. I just tend to mesh things around and bleed one action into the other, just like I wrote it here, so going "End of Cycle 1, Start of Cycle 2" bothers me. I might solve that by asking my players to send their action in the chat to facilitate bookkeeping.
The statblocks I cannot make work. I looked to OpenQuest at the end there to figure out certain stats for the monster and it worked well, so I'll probably veer more towards that direction going forward.
Regarding fantasy and tone, that's another thing I'm reconsidering a bit. This was all much more high fantasy than I was planning - skeletons, necromancers, giant spiders, huge serpents, oh my! - and it's also not quite what I wanted.
When I started this, I spread a few premade modules around, like this one, to "facilitate my prep" and make running things easier. What I'm noticing is that this only happens if I buy in wholesale into the tone that the module is going for, and that's something that is a lot more damaging than I previously considered.
I'll reduce the amount of modules I have on my map, and the ones I do have I'll probably drag down to my level a lot more aggressively. My players do enjoy dungeoneering but from what we spoke about, it seems like they're a lot more interested in exploring the world, seeing what's out there, getting involved in imbroglios and conundrums with sword schools and heists, so that's the direction I want to pull stuff into. Less "crawling through dark corridors with a torch", more "climbing through the back of the tower and whisking the necromancer away, bypassing the whole deal."
These are growing pains that I'm glad to be going through, because it's very motivating.
Will our players be able to pull off a sick heist? Will Piletta find out what the symbols mean? Will Albane finally learn how to fucking read? Find out next time on Sunrise Generation!
