OMG he leveled without ever casting a spell (actual play)

Cyfandil Campaign session 6 (?)

Session date: 6 May 2023
Campaign days 73-75.

We’ve had a tumultuous three weeks IRL. I moved house, and then two of the four regular players (dad and daughter) are having car trouble, meaning they won’t be with us for a little while.

Willy

So today we had
Nathan, playing Nathan the Wizard (MU 1) and
Alyson, playing Bob the Recker (F1)
with henchmen
Young John the Likely Lad (lvl 0) who apparently was recovering from Covid and
Willy the Loser (lvl 0.)

Augustus

In the downtime preceding the session, Bob had gone to the enemy barony of Otter to track down a wandering priest who had a lead on a dungeon with an artifact. He got there by serving as a caravan guard for 2GP per day. Nice.

He found the wandering priest. They conspired in Lawful, and Bob learned what he needed to know. He promised to bring the artifact to the priest, and in return, Bob and his men could keep all the other loot they might find.

Having learned enough, he came back to Cragstone and then joined the rest of the party in Castle Westmarch.

When they arrived, they were less than impressed. “Castle Westmarch,” supposedly a ducal palace, was really nothing more than an armed camp behind some stone curtain walls. (I’ve decided to use the Keep from B2.)

Therein, they spoke to Bailiff, who showed them the tavern, the armorer, the provisioner and put them in touch with the priest. They talked to the taverner, picked up a rumor, and he showed them the common sleeping area where they can flop.

Nathan the Wizard inquired about the private quarters (10 GP per week) and the quality of the beef (6.5, edible.)

Bob offered to sell his elven chain +1, but he didn’t know what it was worth, and the armorer wanted 50 GP to appraise it. No dice.

So the next adventuring day (May 8,) the four of them left the castle to poke around in the hex.

That day, they found that wererats were a problem in the several towns and villages, and there was a 10 GP per head bounty on them, above and beyond any treasure the party finds. They met some town guards that had rounded up 16 of them to be hanged at dawn.

The bumped into some knights from the Order of the White Shield. One of the knights was injured so Bob used his bandages to set the broken bone.

Bob’s good deed turned a potentially deadly encounter into a very friendly one. The squad leader introduced himself as Augustus.

They encamped together and headed back to the castle at dawn.

I awarded them 400 XP for that encounter - enough to push them both over to level 2 so they will train up this week.

And it just occurs to me that Nathan the Wizard has gotten to level 2 literally doing nothing.

He hasn’t cast a spell and he hasn’t thrown a dagger. One time he ran away from a monster, so I guess that counts.

Not bad, Nathan the Wizard. Keep it up and people will soon utter your name in terror.

Overland and Exploration Procedures

I made a procedure cheat sheet for myself and stuck it into my Ref screen. It looks like this: 

Here is the .doc file for your edification. 

Militant Orders in Westmarch

I've pulled the names of these factions and NPCs from deep in the history of Magic the Gathering.  At the start, the several players will only be aware of the Order of the White Shield and Ebon Hand.

They're not the only factions, or even the only human factions. But this is what we have so far. 

Order of the White Shield

Leader: Pavel Maliki Paladin 6
Militant order of FM with some CL

 

Order of Leitbur

Leader: Tobias Andrion CL 6

Militant order of CL

Dedicated to the teachings of Bethan Leitbur

 

Order of the Ebon Hand

Leader: Ramses Overdark FM 7

Militant order of ACL

dedicated to the Cult of Tourach

 

Knights of Stromgald                                                         Leader: Matron Stromgald Ftr 6

Militant order of FM with some ACL

 

Order of the Sacred Torch

Leader: Gabriel Angelfire CL 7

Clerics and Monks

Gabriel Angelfire is an Archangel of Mercy in disguise.

The Order is most interested in dispelling evil and banishing evil outsiders.

 

Stromgald Cabal

Leader: Boris Devilboon, a Fiun

Mixed Fiuns, MU and ACL

 

A Fiun is a free-willed undead of 5 HD. It fights as a FM, saves as a MU, and can cast an elemental attack (fire ball, lightning bolt or cone of cold) three times per day. AC 6. HP 17. ML 7. Treasure type potions and magic items.

 

Has a bodyguard of 2d4 Zombies.

 

Knights of Thorn

Knights of the Thorn are former members of the Orders of Leitbur and Knights of Stromgald. They also have many peasants and men-at-arms in their ranks.

Leader: Tivadar of Thorn CL 5

Their goal is to eradicate goblins and orcs. They do not care to fight others.

Nearheath and Mornsong Wood

Here are two more-representative hexes. Each has an adventure and a wonder. 

 

Hex 0500 - Cradle Wood

Here is a sample page from the hex crawl booklet I am building for the Westmarch campaign. The upper left quadrant has the name and terain type. N = 3 means that we check for encounters three times on 1d6 when traveling across the hex; we check encounters once per hour, with 1-3 on 1d10 meaning an encounter occurs while exploring in the hex.

The wandering monster table has only four monster entries. This is because 1) there really won't be that many chances to roll on the table, which obviates the need for variety and 2) to enforce the idea that "this hex contains X" for any given hex.  

When a monster entry comes up (or in some cases, the Faction entry I suppose) we roll on Table 1 as well to see what kind of encounter it will be.

The Faction entry shows who controls the hex, or in the case of a wild hex, the most likely named NPC or faction the party will encounter. This hex is adjacent to the fort ruled by Lord Atlan, so it is most likely you would meet his men or even himself (and I would shade toward the latter, because it's cool to meet named NPCs.)

The Special tells us that there is some feature in the hex; a town, village, landmark of note or wondrous locale. 

Cities are placed and marked on my map. Any time we roll a wonder for the second time in a hex, it is a landmark instead. 

Her is my landmark generator. It is overly complex; I'm not sure what to do about it except just make stuff up at the play table. Maybe I should use it to generate some landmarks beforehand so I have a list? Here is a stable link to the .pdf.

Westmarch Crawl Format

I've been going through all my 6-mile hexes and assigning each a wandering monster table, an adventure and a wonder. The one-mile hexes are numbered 1-30 so we can randomly determine where in the hex various features reside - just in case it's important later, which it might be. 

Each hex (Except for the castle hex) ought to be an adventure site of its own, and many of them will be suitable to return to over and over. 

As the several players explore and level up, I will suggest to them that their characters ought to fortify areas out in the world as staging areas. There will be towns and villages; some will be adventure sites in their own right and some will be neutral or friendly. By fortifying these areas, the characters will be able to travel farther as well as tame the land. If they have to return to 0800 every day, they won't be able to go much farther than the first adjacent hex.

This will also prepare the people for their new lords, who will (hopefully?) be PCs. 

Here are the charts we use to determine 1) what the encounter is about and 2) what the Special will be. You can see that the Special gets hoarier as the land gets wilder. 

Here we have the Landmark generator. It's very complicated. I'm sure there is an easier way to do it but this is the procedure I will use when we start. Landmarks are not going to come up all that often, but when they do, they should be true and interesting landmarks and not something generic. 

Finally, here is the hex worksheet itself. One per page, all the info you need to generate encounters, and a diagram of the hex so I can draw in the features as they pop up. 

You will see that each hex has a dominant terrain type. In this case "Settled." It also has an N number. In this case, N = 1. That refers to how often we check for an encounter. For this particular hex, we would only check which exploring, but for other hexes we would check while traveling through. 

(Recall that overland travel requires N checks per hex on 1d6, checked upon hex entry; exploring a hex requires one check per hour, with 1-N on 1d10 resulting in an encounter.)

This particular hex has no adventure in it. I don't want the players stopping here - this is safe home territory. 

Question for the penny groundlings: shall we give the several characters a chance to get lost, or shall we forego that part of the crawl? It seems punitive to me tbh. 

Different Hexes Taste Different

In the Westmarch sandbox, I've decided each hex will have a short encounter table with only four monsters plus a Faction entry (based on nearby power centers) and a Special entry (based on the terrain, population, and unique features.)

At the start, I'll only be building 

• 12 or so of these little encounter tables, 
• plus the subtables we talked about yesterday (largely unedited from that post),
• plus a Behavior table to help me flesh out the encounter. 

Why only four monsters on the encounter table? I want to be able to make a strong theme for each hex and then beat the players over the head with it, so that they are immediately aware of "oh, we're in a new area." 

The Scrybwood is going to be strongly faerie-flavored. The Durkwood will be strongly pig-flavored. The Ironwood will be dense with ents and ent clues. The Forest of Regrets will be filled with elfs and their allies. 

etc. 

If I have only four entries, I can make one be the main creature type, one be a subsidiary of it (dire boar and wereboar for instance,) have one boss-fight type (wyvern, stone giant, bandit army) and one undead or lycan type. This way, hex taste will be reinforced with many of the encounters. 

When the character of the hex changes, I will substitute one or more of the listings. When the party kills the green dragon in hex 0204, I'll replace it with a family of hippogriffs or an army of orcs or something. 

Each entry will have the (number appearing) of (creature name) and (lair %.) Probably something I would be willing to fudge for the purposes of verisimilitude, but not to "fix" it for the players. 

So here's that Behaviors table: 

So with this table, I can roll the entity encountered, what that entity is doing, and what problem it might have. These will just be suggestions, but suggestions that will prevent the "Orc-And-Pie" problem popping up with every encounter.

Special Nested Encounter Tables

 In the Westmarch sandbox I’m building, each hex will have a unique, very short encounter table. There will be four listings for monsters, plus a Faction, plus a Special. That makes for a 1d6 table. 

A Message For You, Rudy

I think the Specials should be hex features: some landmarks, some wondrous locales, and some towns and villages. That means there have to be different charts for more-civilized and less-civilized regions. 

I already use three levels of civilization for my domain rules so I’ll use the same ones here: civilized, borderlands and wilderlands. So I will have three subtables for the Special result, SC, SB and SW or S1, S2 and S3 (haven’t decided yet.) The correct subtable will be indicated on the appropriate main table. 

Nested Special tables 

Table SC Civilized

1 town

2 village

3 village 

4 landmark

(Cities are always placed)

Table SB Borderlands

1 village

2 village

3 landmark

4 landmark

5 wandering merchant

6 wonder

Table SW Wilderlands

1 homestead

2 fort (landmark)

3 demihuman village 

4 wonder

5 wonder

6 landmark 

In any individual hex, there is a maximum of one wonder to discover. Once that hex’s wonder is discovered, that listing becomes a landmark instead. 

Octagon Crawl

PROTIP: Weird headlines draw eyeballs. 

I’m working on my Westmarch campaign sandbox now, building simple and flavorful generative content for each hex. Of course much of that is from the random tables. 

My random encounter tables will have four listings for monster encounters, one marked FACTION, and one marked SPECIAL. These each lead to other subtables. 

FACTION will give me a chance to bring names NPCs into the picture to give the players a feel about the geopolitics, give quest hooks, and maybe make friends or enemies. I will almost always know which faction(s) are in the region.

SPECIAL is a landmark (wonder or natural feature), a settlement, or a merchant. 

The idea is that the first 2/3 of the table gives hyper-local flavor and the last 1/3 is broader details of the world and logistical support. 

On its own this suggests a heck of a lot of wandering tables, but I don’t need to make them all up ahead of time. The several players are only going to chew through a few hexes a night in any particular direction and I suspect there will be a lot of times when they stay in one hex. Furthermore, each only has four entries (with four auxiliary entries to use if the first ones don’t make sense.) it’ll be more formatting hassle than anything.