Author: Aaron Griffin

Just wanted to share a fun moment when I believe I saw a player’s “adversarial GM brain damage” fizzle away.

We had an event where a itty bitty imp ripped a hole in reality to summon a shadowy tentacle monster from the shadow realm (I used Dirk Detweiler Leichty’s chromatic tentacula almost as is for this). Well the imp got scared, shut the magic down, and the tentacles grabbed hold of the tear and began pulling it apart to fit it’s bulk into our reality.

The first great turnaround here was that my players officially went from “guys trying to save their own skin” to “big damned heroes” who tried to save the locals and the small town.

Secondly, the big pivotal moment, was when the punchy Fighter who tried to make a min-maxed combat character realized he wasn’t going to be able to last for long and made some fantastically creative choices – grabbing a stinger on the end of a tentacle to stab it into another tentacle, tying them up and letting him get closer and closer to the tear. I was interested to see what he intended to do. And he did what he did best – he punched. And punched. The tentacles ripping open the tear were stomped on in the way a villain stomps on the fingers of the hero hanging off a ledge. And when all was said and done, the magical forces of the cleric and bard where no match for simply punching a portal closed.

The fighter changed after this. He became inventive and creative, no longer content to just punch things to death when there was trouble. He even managed to convince the imp, that the tattoos on his body were magic runes and he was a great wizard able to banish him to the realm that creature came from in order to Parley with the thing.

I figure it might be fun to post interesting session events just to see what other people think AND to give other people ideas.

We began with planning a 2 month overland journey to a new area they need for Their Big Goal. I threw in the Perilous Wilds exploration and travel moves [quite poorly, I wasn’t as familiar as I should have been].

First, they came across a traveler (Discovery) who offered some whiskey for companionship along the route. Later, as a hard move he ended up stealing 3 bolts of silk in the night, was noticed, chased, and beaten unconscious. The silk was covered in mud, torn from branches, and generally not salvageable.

In the next town, we played a bit of merchant-ing. I quickly threw together a custom version of the Supply move to cover sales – they specify and explain the intended markup, 10+ they sell it at that markup, 7-9 half the markup and they can’t sell it all.

We also learned that the area has a religious Festival of Lights where they publicly burn volunteers alive for their god. More on this to come…

On the way out of town, the merchant guild hit them with taxes. Turns out they would actually take a 2 coin loss after taxes, so they bard decides to haggle and we end up Parleying with a promise of transporting something along their way free of charge if they can get a break on taxes. Bard rolls boxcars. “Take some freight for us up to the capitol city and we’ll wave the fee.”

So in the morning when the 3 large crates big enough to fit a horse each is loaded onto their wagon, and they get a few hours outside of the city, a Scout Ahead (Perilous Wilds) roll of 6- has the scout come back to the wagon with no new information.

That’s when one of the crates starts crying. I seems not all of those in the Festival of Lights are volunteers.