Sunrise Generation - Session 3 Play Report
This time we had a downtime in between sessions of 1 week, we find our alleged heroes pursuing a rumour they heard about the Harbourmaster Productive Law needing subtle strikebreakers to break a strike up the river Mercy, in a salt mine.
Originally we had planned to do some more intrigue but I guess my players just can't sleep well knowing the plight of the working man, so following the red star of socialism in the sky, they guided themselves upriver to the mine.
It is saturday, March 1st of the 19th year of the reign of His Royal Highness, the King Mustial. It is a warm and cloudy day in the river Mercy and a powerful gale can be seen atop the Raindrop Mountains.
The mine was actually up a tributary of the river Mercy, but thankfully it was wide enough to go along the banks and use the slow water course instead of the faster middle.
- DM Commentary: At this time I noticed I hadn't enough river hexes to justify the speed of the boats I assigned in my travel procedure, but I just rolled with it. Theoretically they could have gone up to 3 hexes up a slow river, but they just went 2, so that was just around 3 hours of travel. Small maps, smaller distances.
They arrived at the outflow docks at the side of an inn. Cleft the Boatman, Giallo the Masterless Knight, and Piletta the Healer decided they'd go in and grab some food; Albane the Thief decided to hang back.
The inn was empty of people and only had strange, dark, viscous water on the ground. Piletta dropped a page of a book to see if it changed colour but it didn't, and Giallo tasted it and found it strangely salty.
They proceded to check the kitchen to raid it for food, and in there they found a strange blob of water. Cleft, who has a skill of lore about river spirits, remembered a tall tale about ghosts of people who die in the river coming back possessing part of the river, and that seemed to be related to this. They could make out a feminine voice coming from inside the glob of water and a translucent silhouette of a person seemingly trapped in there.
Cleft tried diplomacy but the thing was having none of it, and he also didn't want Giallo slashing at it, so they doubled back and ran only to find a hulking glob coming from the guestrooms, pushing the doorway and making the floor creak.
Pannicking, Piletta dashed for the entrance while Giallo and Cleft ran towards the veranda.
Piletta was grabbed by the water-ghost (which Cleft has been calling umibozu) but Giallo and Cleft managed to pull her out of there with an oar. The three arrived at the veranda and used the railing to jump on top of the roof, but the glob came barreling through and destroyed the railing and the columns; a bit of the roof started to cave in!
The 3 fell in the water with the undine-like monster and Cleft, who's a great swimmer, had to choose between the 2 who to drag to shore. He picked Giallo, but Piletta managed to get away too, and the monster turned out to be rejected by the river, falling straight through the water while the river itself avoided it, and allowing the PCs to regroup and chill.
- DM Commentary: I honestly didn't expect this part of the adventure to take too long but it was a fun little chase scene. It took some backflips from my part because I hadn't made a statblock for these things, so I went mostly by reckoning.
The PCs elected to go further inland, where the found an improvised settlement that seemed to have been built very recently, and there they found the overseer of the mine, who explained that there was no strike at all, but rather bandits had taken control and were forcing people to mine it.
See, this is a gold mine that the Grandee was hiding from the Lord Regent (who actually runs the country). They had struck gold recently, some knights posted in the postal town of Orange took wind of it and went down to take the mine for themselves, and have been ever since. But the overseer didn't tell anyone up the chain that it was bandits because he was afraid it would lead to a massacre if the Grandee's knights got involved.
Instead, the overseer asked our PCs to kindly go in there and try to make a distraction to smoke the bandits and workers out of the mine so that they, outside, could shoot them. If they managed it without killing any miners, they could keep part of the loot of the bandits and one gold ingot each.
- DM Commentary: Admittedly this was a lot of exposition, and the overseer's task is pretty difficult to accomplish. That's intentional.
Cleft said he'd do it for free and the group started hatching up a plan. Giallo knew these bandits were Wild Ones - sort of Landsknechts, part of a social movement of knights who dress gaudily with whatever expensive clothes they can pile up, wear big swords and phallic imagery, and are generally Rude Crude Dudes. Giallo felt some kinship to them, so he'd disguise himself as someone wanting to join the bandits, and Piletta as his doctor.
Meanwhile, Cleft and Albane disguised themselves as workers and went in right after.
Giallo (now calling himself "Uncle Jerky" and Piletta "The Magnificent Momo") came down the mineshaft making a lot of noise and ended up drawing the attention of the patrol: Pilirant and his 3 bandit auxiliaries.
- DM Commentary: This was a very serendipitous random encounter!
Giallo and Piletta quickly noticed these bandits were weirder than usual. They painted their skin red, and Pilirant himself had what seemed to be fangs and a huge scar. The patrol was ready to kill the duo, but when Giallo said he wanted to join, Pilirant took him to his boss, Aldon, a smart and cruel red bandit who allowed Giallo to join his band if he consented to having his little finger chopped by a knife.
Surprisingly Giallo / Jerky agreed.
And also asked to eat his own little finger.
The bandits were amused and told him to go lay down a bit in their sleeping quarters, at the top of the chamber they were. This was a huge hollow chamber the size of a 5 story building or so, so it was divided in 3: at the top it's where the bandits slept, in the middle is where Aldon and his foremen overlooked the workers from a wooden platform, and at the bottom it's where people mined the gold and panned it from the natural hot springs.
In the middle of the chamber there was a tunnel that took to the mineshaft and also to the other side of the mine, where workers were still mining salt. This will become important.
While Giallo and Piletta rested, we cut back to Cleft and Albane. In the first chamber of the mine, where they used to mine salt but not so much anymore, they found a small shrine with a statue for Saint Earth Womb, patron of the dead and guardian of children, currently defaced by the bandits.
- DM Commentary: This room was supposed to have a trap in it but it was meant to be at the entrance, and I forgot the entrance was a mineshaft, so I didn't have anything ready and just left the shrine in there.
They went the opposite way that Giallo and Piletta did and found a big red guy too overseeing some people in very bad shape draining water manually from a pretty significant leakage.
A reaction roll made it so this red bandit didn't even consider that they might be anything other than workers, and tried sending them back to their post.
Cleft refused and the red guy started throwing a tantrum and yelling that he was the boss, so Cleft used some gentle parenting and went ahead.
In the next room, Cleft and Albane found a group of women hauling salt up the mine. They didn't recognize either of them, but Albane asked them for silence and kept moving.
This was a big room, they emerged at the top part of it, but there was an incline that led to the lower part of it, which was flooded and had some shitty wooden boards being used as improvised bridges to cross it.
Albane followed a corridor forward that bended down and Cleft climbed down the incline. They ended up meeting at the bottom of the room and went ahead to the next one.
There they found two bandits discussing something in a room that oversaw a whole ass underground lake. Albane eavesdropped on them and managed to gather that they were trying to flood the mine.
At that thought, Cleft approached them to discuss it: there was a blocked tunnel in this room that connected to the main mineshaft, the bottom of which connected to both the side of the mine being mined for salt and the gold mine, but it would be risky to go down there and remove the blockage.
Cleft said "hold my beer" and jumped in the water, managed to snatch a win from the jaws of defeat by rolling extremely well, and unblocked the passage. When he came back ashore, the bandits were gone. Huh.
- DM Commentary: Genuinely did not expect him to pull this off. He was rolling 1d100 + 20 to hit 100 and managed it. Absolute madlad.
Before this happened, Albane had gone ahead to the next chamber and mixed with some of the women hauling the salt to the mineshaft, and said that the mine was gonna flood. They basically said "well shit, someone has to tell the gold miners!"
That's when they felt some drops of water in their shoulders and Albane dashed ahead in the corridor, emerging in the gold mine gallery.
But before that we cut back to Giallo and Piletta, who saw 2 men (the 2 bandits that had deserted Cleft) saying that Arberon, presumably one of the bosses, had asked for the New Guy to go down there and get the 2 bags of silver that Aldon had.
Giallo said No Way José and the two guys went down there themselves.
Suddenly Giallo and Piletta heard noises of a fight breaking out at the bottom of the chamber, Aldon having to break the fight apart, and the two scoundrels from before running up the ladder with bags of silver in their backs.
Giallo intercepted them and demanded the bags. Him and the bandits locked eyes and suddenly they heard someone yelling "FLOOD! FLOOD!" down the chamber. It was Albane, who had emerged from the corridor, thrown some gold ingots at the crowd to get their attention and notify them of the incoming flood. They then grabbed one ingot to themselves in their bucket and dashed up the stairs with many people in tow.
The whole wooden platform where Aldon stood was coming down on top of him and some of the other workers; the hot springs at the pit of the mine were overflowing, people were being crushed, it was a sight to see.
Albane showed up at the top of the stairs to find Giallo staring down some guy, Piletta trying to run away, and Cleft - who ran from the chamber he was up to here and followed the screams - across from them at the other side of the room.
- DM Commentary: Notice that we were jumping around all over the place because the entire group decided to split multiple times lol I think it worked well though!
Albane and Piletta dashed out of the chamber along with the waves of workers, Cleft went against the grain and jumped in the water to save as much people as he could, and Giallo made a deal with one of the bandits: they would duel outside for the bag of silver.
And with that we ended the 3rd issue of the Sunrise Generation comic.
DM Shop Talk
Not much to say this time besides that I was planning all of this by the seat of my pants. We play at 2 PM on saturdays; I finished the dungeon 1:30 AM of the previous friday. I don't think it necessarily came out rushed, but I could have used one extra day to think this over. Unfortunately I thought thursday was actually wednesday and that fucked me up big time.
Oh and I'm glad Giallo decided to duel the guy next session because I hadn't written out my Hârn house rules to use with Mythras so... yeah.
Otherwise, I was pleased with the action scenes. I had to juggle a couple different POVs but I think I managed to make it through. I did ask for more rolls this time around, maybe more than I should have, but the players were also a lot bolder in their plans of action so I think it was warranted.
Regarding the fantasy level, I think I'm managing to slow down the impetus. The "umibozu" were presented as weird, dissonant tall tales come to life, and I left the bandits vague on what was going on with them - if it really was something magic or if they're just big and stupid.
But then, that's intentional. The jungle in Sunrise Generation is meant to evoke the feeling of those strange umibozu creatures, so on that front I think it was successful! And hopefully my players enjoyed it as much as I did.
Will Giallo manage to defeat the bandit in a sword duel? Will Cleft tell any of the people he saved that he also flooded the mine? Will the Lord Regent find out about the Grandee's gold mine and Chernobyl this fucking place into the ground? Will I finally make up my fucking mind whether to use Hârn or Mythras for combat!?
Find out NEXT TIME... ON...
SUNRISE GENERATION!
