Dark Albion Session 1 Campaign Diary

-
Well, that escalated quickly.

I had some hiccups getting things going in my Dark Albion game. Chiefly among the issues, about 5 players backed from playing the game within a few days of our starting night. It being an online game, I anticipated this. I recruited 8 players total.

Since we only had 3 players actually play and Lion & Dragon is a lethal ass game, I told them to go ahead and run their back-up PCs. This left us with 2 Clerics: Agnes and William, 1 Fighter: Grace, 1 Magister: Roland, and 2 Thieves: Yorick and Leonard.

Sir John Neville and his Magister, William the Elder, explained his plan to the party. They were to disguise themselves as monks returning to the abbey at Stamford Bridge, retrieve a cache of armor and weapons in the catacombs, wait until nightfall, then storm the manor to capture Lord Egremont and force his men to stand down.

It went off without a hitch. By leaning into the Monk disguises and putting the "Clerics on official business" spin on it, the guards were not about to cause them any grief. Agnes even admonished the guards for staying at the Neville manor without permission, and the guards backed down completely. 

They found the abbey to be unkempt with thick layers of dust throughout, only disrupted by footprints that primarily led to a door in the back. Inspecting closer, they found dried blood on the door. The door was barred on their side. William blessed his sword and they (except for Roland, who chickened out) ventured into the catacombs, the trail of dried blood leading deeper down. At the base of the stairs, a pool of blood became a trail of bloody footprints. Some shuffling feet could be heard in the darkness, and that soon became the hurried sprinting of two naked, decaying corpses.

Agnes and William, the heavily armored Clerics, took the front with swords in hand, Grace and Yorick behind with spears. It was an effective strategy, heightened even more so by the first zombie tripping over itself. Both were quickly dispatched and none of the party suffered any injuries, quite miraculously.

They searched the crypt, deciding to scour the resting places of the less important in order to find the cache of equipment. It wasn't long before they found everything they needed. It turned out that they also found a hidden doorway leading to a shrine with a knight's sword and an old tome resting on it.

William quickly realized that the tome had a sigil for summoning a demon. He had them close the door and leave everything as it was.

The group decided to scour the rest of the crypt to ensure no more creatures of chaos were loitering about. The next room they searched had the sarcophagi of two prominent family members, but they wouldn't get to see that before fighting an enormous bloated corpse. The corpse managed to claw into Agnes, but Agnes deflected any meaningful injury. They then stabbed the creature and cut off its head.

They checked the two sarcophagi to make sure the dead stayed dead, then moved on to the final chamber. Upon sliding the lid on the sarcophagus in the final chamber, the entirety of the catacombs erupted with movement and a bony arm shot up in the crack between the lid and the wall of the sarcophagus, aiming to grab them.

With a crashing noise in the room behind them, the group realized the extent of the shitstorm they had started. They bolted for the stairs, catching glimpses of all of the dead rising from their resting place to kill the intruders. The group slammed the door shut behind them and barred it.

Meanwhile, Roland had a pleasant chat with a wealthy city dweller and his bodyguards. The villain eventually identified himself as Peter Lound. Peter, believing Roland to be a monk keeping the grounds, asked if the abbey was prepared to take his confession. With clever words and a winning spirit, Roland convinced Lound to return in the evening so that he could release this great burden.

Roland returned to the inside of the abbey to find his group bursting through the door, with the scratching of undead at the barred door.

A plan was formed. One way or another, the group would see tobit that Lound and his men did not put a damper on their capturing of Lord Egremont. Despite many pleadings from Yorick to release the skeletons to assault the army, it seems a more subtle approach is being taken.

Next week, we'll see how it goes!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fighting Giants and Other Huge Creatures in D&D

-
Image
(Art by Satoshi Kamanaka https://www.artstation.com/artwork/X0xnL) Battles with enormous creatures should be epic, yes? Some of the most exhilarating fights in cinema, literature, and video games have been arduous, grueling battles between our heroes and these cowering Titans who obliterate entire buildings without even meaning to. Typically, in TTRPGs,  these combats are scarcely differentiated from combats with medium sized creatures that have massive amounts of hit points. Sure, there are size categories that have certain implications, and there are often hard hitting attacks or special abilities. But there's a lot of potential for greatness here that I believe isn't being capitalized on. For the sake of our purposes here, I'm going to be speaking in terms of 5e D&D mechanics, simply because it's incredibly easy to pare down to OSR standards, but is more widely understood. TIP ONE: PARTITIONING HP My first tip is to take that big ol' HP pool and b...
Read more

The Player Experience: OSR vs 5e

-
Image
The Player Experience in 5E vs OSR, a Brief Comparison (Skip to next session if you want the bullet points) In Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, player characters are heroes. From the very beginning, 5e PCs are well beyond the capabilities of the average populace.  They have above average ability scores, they get a full hit die + CON HP, Spellcasters start with several spells to choose from with multiple castings per day and cantrips they can use at-will. Martial classes start with benefits that put them significantly ahead of 1HD creatures, such as Fighting Styles, Second Wind, Martial Arts, etc. This also says nothing of the many skill proficiencies and expertise. This gap only increases as the game goes on. By contrast, games in the OSR tend to be far less charitable to starting characters. For a basis of comparison, we'll focus on Old School Essentials, as it's a direct retro-clone of one of the most foundational editions in the OSR, Moldvay B/X D&D from 1981.  Wha...
Read more

5e Monster: Aberrant Tapeworm

-
The Aberrant Tapeworm Generic, right? There really is no better way to describe this thing. It's nice and understated, fitting somewhere between somewhat ominous and extremely inconvenient. The Aberrant Tapeworm is a parasite. It's introduced to the host through undercooked meat when animals graze in corrupted fields, but you can change that to whatever. In my campaign, an Inquisitor ate a wild hog that ate some weeds in the field the Inquisitor murdered his wife. While typical tapeworms seek sustenance through absorbing nutrients, Aberrant Tapeworms multiply inside the host, introducing foreign agents into the bloodstream that induce rage and paranoia. People will observe worrisome mood changes in the afflicted, but will often be murdered by the host before having a full grasp on what's happening. As they grow and replicate (over 5-6 days), they maneuver to the brain and sieze control of the host's body. When this happens, they devour organs and use their inherent tele...
Read more