Sunsets Upon the Coast - Session 1 Play Report
Last Friday (21/11) one of my players had to leave the Delta Green campaign for personal reasons, so we decided Delta Green had reached a good stopping point and decided to pivot to something else. That was the Sunsets Upon the Coast campaign, using Wolves Upon the Coast Campaign by Luke Gearing but with some added pizzazz. We just had the first session and it was very surprising.
Prepping for it
I'm an anxious prepper. As I've mentioned before in this blog, I haven't really ran games by voice throughout most of my gaming career, so I had to learn how to prep things correctly and on a consultable basis very recently. This is doubly worse for Wolves Upon the Coast, which is not indexed, written in a highly terse language that makes it sometimes difficult to parse, and has no overview of anything.
However, I faced this as a challenge: I had 1 week to prepare to run the perfect hexcrawl sandbox session, something I've only ever done a few times before. If I was to prep, I had to be very efficient.
I started out by reading most of the hexes my players would be able to access, then I went to work on the system (nothing against Wolves but I used my own Target20 rules with a pinch of Pendragon, inspired by Weird Writer's version), and as I ran out of things to prep, I decided to index the settlements of Wolves for my own benefit. I do not like reading things out of lists, in order, so taking notes while doing it tricks me into getting on top of things.
Ultimately, I went from being cautiously pessimistic about Wolves due to its language and my not liking metal very much, to despising how Luke Gearing cannot seem to be straightforward about anything to save his life, to really enjoying it. It's a strange progression, but with hindsight I can tell that it was mostly anxiety speaking.
What made things click for me was slowly seeing the connections between the hexes blossom, and seeing how I could see the aesthetic of the world come into being too. Much is not defined in Wolves, but much else is, it just asks you what exactly do you want this to be. Sometimes it feels like the author didn't put in the legwork, but much more often, I started noticing instead that the gaps were steering you towards something. Grappling with the pre-existing assumptions of Wolves and modelling it to my own ethos was the most difficult bit, and something I knew would only ever come to the fore in play.
The actual session: Late Spring 23, Monday
The campaign began on Late Spring 231. I decided to twist the start of Wolves. In Wolves, you begin with a raiding vessel, and a crew of 12 ex-thralls who look up to you for leadership. In Sunsets Upon the Coast, they began with 2 HD more than usual, no crew, and a fishing boat that is decidedly not oceangoing - in fact, it had 1 in 6 chances of capsizing due to the waves of the high oceans.
We had 2 players present: Weird Writer playing Tiny Lukas and Mr. Mann playing Hastur, refusing to conform to the strange naming convention I established for the world, as well as their camp follower Dorcas, a laundress. They debated a bit at first where to go but decided to go due West, island-hopping the ocean towards the Wolves equivalent of Scotland.2
The weather was clear and the winds were calm and there was great mist, which made them go off-course, but they didn't notice it. They rowed until the middle of the ocean, dropped anchor, ate one of their 3 days of food that their dead captor had taken with them and slept on the waves. I didn't make a big deal out of not having an anchor and sleeping on the ocean as the weather was calm enough not to warrant that.
Late Spring 24, the hall
Lukas and Hastur rowed southwest and saw land, established they were lost, and decided to hug the coast and go around it. When they reached the southern point, they saw an abandoned town at the crease of a seacliff.3 The hexkey was imprecise about the location of the thing as it seemed like there was a cliff but also a jetty, so I ruled it was under the cliff. They stopped to investigate.
They saw longhouses long abandoned, no corpses or items inside, and spent a portion of their day investigating. Unbeknownst to them, there were 5 trolls led by the troll-king Hjalmar right on the hall at the end of the village. That's 20 HD worth of enemies. I ruled there was a 2 in 6 chance the trolls would come out to investigate while they searched and rolled high.
They decided to investigate the hall at this point and, before going in, Hastur went around to check it. Since the sun was going down and the trolls hadn't gone out yet, I ruled they were stirring, and Hastur saw something moving between the boards of the hall. Coward that he is, he ran back to tell Tiny Lukas, and both of them hid.
The trolls came out, I rolled to check if they would see Tiny Lukas (who was hiding very close to them, behind a column adjacent to the doors) and failed again, so the trolls just decided to walk towards the village while our players snuck inside their home.
The trolls eventually saw the players' boat out on the jetty and I rolled reaction to check if they would care to return and grab their stuff, or if they would lose their mind and run straight towards the boat - the key made it clear they were very hungry and very desperate to move out of the island. I got a 2, so I ruled they ran as fast as possible towards the boat.
Inside the bone-strewn filthy hall, the players found:
- Quite a few silver coins;
- Two small bundles of Mother of Pearl shells (imprecisely high value, I've elected not to tell the players the value of treasure without an appraisal);
- A big book of some sort;
- A vial of bright purple ink;
- And two cloth bags of old teeth which warmed the hands faintly.
They also found the mail hauberk of the troll-king. The hex key said he had it, but I see no reason he would be walking around a warm day wearing stuffy hot metal on his skin. They counted their coins as they watched the trolls make out with their boat in the direction of dawn. Lukas and Hastur helped Dorcas sweep the floor and light the fire to cook their food and ponder their next move.
- Havoc's Note: They never found out about this, but remember how the vessel was not oceangoing? Well, it had a 1 in 6 chance of capsizing, a 3 in 6 chance of recovering from that capsize, and a pretty high chance of getting lost due to the fog and the gentle winds of spring. And so the great troll-king of Hjalmar sunk to the bottom of the ocean, to become food for the isopods - no one ever said trolls could not drown.
Late Spring 25, 26, and 27, shipwrecked
That morning, Hastur decided to dig a hole and give a proper burial to all the bones they had found on the hall of the troll king when he came upon a shipwreck close to the jetty. Three raiders out from Faroe stared at him but they eventually found friendly ground and discussed their situation. They were led by Little Ox, and had between them the shipwright Sunset Grass and Egill the Red, who knows how to set bones. This knowledge wouldn't help him now, as his leg was broken.
- Havoc's Note: This was entirely random. I decided to roll ocean encounters every night and day to see if a ship would pass by, and the only encounter I got was a shipwreck. To make it clear how crazy this is, there was a 1 in 6 chance of encounter per day/night, and a further 1 in 12 that it would be a shipwreck. I rolled again on the table to see what kind of boat it was and took it from there.
After discussing it further, Tiny Lukas and Hastur decided to join Little Ox; Sunset Grass would need 3 days to fix their ship, enough to limp back to Borg, but food was the pressing issue, so Tiny Lukas and Hastur spent this day and the following two trying to forage for edible plants and mushrooms while the rest fixed the boat.
They could only find 2 meals-worth of food, the island was stripped bare of animal life. Famine set in, and those three miserable nights they spent around the fire revealed to them that the youthful Little Ox was a temperate and brave fellow, a typical soldier.
Late Spring 28
On the last day of spring, Sunset Grass finished the repairs. The boat would not be oceangoing, but it was going to be enough to risk it back to Borg. Faster than a raft anyway, and wouldn't need the minimum 8 rowers for the warboat if they managed to use the wind, which was currently blowing in the direction they wanted to go.
Before setting sail, the party offered Little Ox to keep the silver coins and Mother of Pearl shells as booty. They kept the rest. This was smart, as I had rolled for Little Ox's reaction once he found out they had money and had gotten a negative one, so he would definitely try to claim that treasure if they hadn't anticipated it.
However, due to not being oceangoing, the worst came to pass: the vessel capsized. All of Little Ox's coins went to the bottom of the sea, and Red Egill, who was in a stretcher, went overboard. Little Ox cried out for help but only Hastur had a rope, which he threw towards Egill, but it was for naught and the man drowned.
- Havoc's Note: This was a choice of Hastur. I told him he could either try a Save to get Egill and risk losing his rope, or not doing anything. He decided to risk it, and failed the Save.
In a sour mood, they arrived back in Borg and were invited to be Little Ox's guests, just as he had been theirs back in the island. A friendship started to form with Little Ox at this point, it seems.
Early Summer, 1st - Summer Solstice
As it was a Sunday and a day of Mass, as well as the summer solstice inaugurating the coming of summer, the players decided to attend Mass to bring the book they had found to the priest. They found, instead, the Bishop of Borg, Celestial Sunbeam, saying Mass to the entire city, including the king, Pepper Vagn, who seemed quite dashing. They waited Mass to end and then approached the bishop with the book they had found, which had survived the capsizing. The bishop was very interested and said the Church had a bounty in books like that, and paid them quite a lot of money for it. He also identified (it was a 1 in 6 chance) the purple ink they had as a draught of inviolability, which made you immune to regular weapons for a short while.
The players decided to very generously divide their cash between them, Little Ox, and the families of the crew of Little Ox's ship. The draught of inviolability they decided to gift to the king, which the bishop told them could be done in tonight's summer solstice feast, which they could come as the bishop's guests to relate their tale of woe.
That is precisely what they did! The both of them spent half the day visiting the bereaved families along with Little Ox and the other half they attended the feast. They were clearly out of place there and sat at the very edge of the farthest table, and it had been a week since they had taken a bath.
The king appeared with a show of horsemanship, prancing his beautiful stallion atop the tables, cleared for that purpose, and then heroically listening to a warrior of his which had brought him the body of a giant boar. For that mighty deed of heroism, Vagn deigned to reward him with a considerable amount of goods - thus introducing to the players that Vagn was willing to pay for mighty heroes to act in his stead and kill terrible beasts.
After this warrior, they were asked by the bishop to come up and relate their tale of woe, inspiring the court with their dignity and the fearsome appearance of their troll-foes. This act was unrewarded, of course - all they did was outwit a foe and brought no proof - but the tale was well-told and so, if they ever decide to do further acts of heroics under Vagn's banner, they are welcome to try.
The session ended at the start of the 2nd day of summer, with the party pondering their next move. They considered if they had enough money to buy their freedom from their erstwhile captors, but found out that they had been far too extravagant with their generosity, and lacked the funds to pay for that. Not only that, but they also lacked a boat.
The party ultimately decided to become too big to fail, in case their captors ever came knocking: they would prove themselves heroes of Vagn's court. We'll see how that works out, next time... on... SUNSETS UPON THE COAST!
