Stormbringer Wolves Upon the Coast Session 5

Returning to the treasure hoard of the manticore, they establish the leather cover of the holy book is High Melnibone, the furs and silks are salvageable, and it is an odd stone when only the top is melted. Also cash.

Outside the walls of Dorbog, they attend a final feast on their behalf and trade their goods. Their reputation means no one dares cheat them and pays what the goods are valued.

Donnagh says he will have the clothes washed on the guarantee he will buy them; this is combined with the gold thread. Mish tells them the flagstone is from an old library, and it would make a good pillow. Is dismissive of Macullen from Stamullen and the party worries that he has fallen afoul of the rest of the druids. When asked about Donenashoe, he is vague. It’s an ancient city, they fell afoul of hubris and were destroyed and going near it is dangerous.

They rest and feast one more day and head up. Althrow Tams sleeps on flagstone and rolls success, learning Haste. I decide since there are no demons yet to bind for POW increase, she can roll under her raw POW score after learning a spell to see if POW goes up by 1. It is now raining quite heavily.

They march up the river to Donenashoe, they see the city and realises how big it is. Llamon the juggernaut is rolled to be on the far side and 3 turns away. As they advance through the ruins they see the massive ground up tracks and the new growth poking through. Dongal warns about the children of the city that never left. Sigmar after learning that there are flagstones and weird carvings on the drystone houses, attempts to lift the biggest stone she can find.

That fails and the noise brings dark shapes and alerts Llamon. The party sees dark shapes in the ruins approach them. Luckily the disposition of the forgotten children is positive. They are as if a child was thin and hollow, with bulging eyes and complexion like all their blood replaced with green-grey fluid. There are 14 of them and they circle the party demanding tools to be like adults. Althrow Tams interrogates them to little success. They have been here since there were adults, something happened overseas, and people started leaving. Llamon got turned on and keeps everyone away. Then something happened in the temple and now it’s a bad place that turns people to stone.

Sigmar thinks this is not working and strips off her armour to take flight over the city. Picking up they are dressed in mismatched scrapes, Althrow Tams realizes they could accept cloth. They are going to give up Miklas Domonkos' cloak and take Dongal's cloak for him and Dongal complains he’ll die of the wet. They realise the children will take scraps, about two thumbs square.

So they chop up Dongal's cloak and trim back their own, allowing them to move through the ruins as each new group arrive in a shifting mostly positive throng.

Sigmar careens over the buildings and see the statues and the temple also Llamon. Pushes a child statue over and sees that it's anatomicall correct inside. Later (metagaming from being supossedly far apart) they realise the statues don't control the children.
She realizes Llamon is turning and beginning to gallop towards them. Flying back, she warns the party, and they believe Llamon is the one transforming people into statues. A horsilisk.

With Llamon bearing down on them, four great stone pillars for legs, one for the neck and head and a body of mattered fur entwined with brambles. The party decided to run, but it’s bearing down on them across the city, so they hide in buildings. Randomly decided DNG and a rower are pulped when Llamon crushes the building they were hiding in. The party doesn’t know what to do. But suggest seeking out a weak spot while remaining very silent. This is ruined by a rower saying he found treasure on the floor as per the site description. Sigmar decides to fly into it and cling to it. She does and it tries to buck her with no success. At some point she fails a roll but passes the Dodge or Die roll.

As she climbs around, hampered by the rain and finds none on the back, head or neck. She clambers down to the chest, gripping it upside down but unable to cut the seam. The party realise that they will be crushed eventually, so they decide to distract the creature. No of them are any good at Oration or Singing to inspire the remaining rowers, so Miklas Domonkos decides to run forward between the legs and distract it. He passes the Dodge or Die roll and Llamon rears up.
Sigmar takes advantage to cut the seam and the internal parts somewhere between squishy clockwork and bags of internal organs spill out as Llamon dies. Also a great rush of black goo.

Having successfully defeated the guardian and shaken, the party loot the treasure on the Bonetheif's map, head back to Dorbog and recruit Hrafnkel, as a replacement. Sigmar puts on balck ring with the X rune. Played by the fifth player s who was on a short break between Mutants & Masterminds and this campaign. Need to give him +5 to Attack and Parry to represent 2 HD.

There is a minor incident where a Power roll x 5 is rolled to represent a Luck roll and is successful. Mish the druid interrupts them at the market when selling the silver tetradrachma. Mish recognizes what they are, and the jeweler was going to just melt them down for hacksilver. He explains their real worth and pays with money that really belongs to Donnagh, who is choking at the cost. The party is thrilled. Mish teaches them the secrets of blood magic for doing various great thingsa nd they really can't make anything else too much worse. Teaches them to vague "poem" about the thing in the temple. I say the stanza on Volume 2 & Monsters is a translation and it rhythms in Ruis.

Sigmar learns Far Sight from the flagstone and they want to start passing it about. More power and complications to them. Skills go up for several characters.

Stormbringer Wolves Upon the Coast Session 4

Still seething about the cost of the drinks, they followed up on the rumors of a man with no face and the magic involved. They are joined by weaponsmith Miklas Domonkos, from Pannonia. Who had been supplying goods to the churches and townships of Ruislip.

They met the faceless man and were puzzled by how his face seemed to not be there and they had problems focusing on it not being there. He indicated the sign which said a 1000 SP reward for the capture of the Manticore which stole his face and pointed north. On the way they dispatched Yrestor (his player arrives late) and the rowers to gather rowan berries and they bought a net.

As they walked along the windswept grasses, they found a spoor and followed it to the sea cliffs. Seeing the tracks enter the water, Sigmar did a tricky (tumble roll) flight over the waves and rocks, espying the sea-cave entrance. It was higher tide, so they waited on top of the escarpment. At low tide while night fell, the manticore emerged from the cave and padded up the beach, it saw the campsite and looked at it, then lopped into the dunes and towards the forest. Fearing for the berry-gatherers, they catch up with them as they approach with torches. They decide to crush the Rowan berries and smear it on the net for magical warding. Sigmar volunteers to stretch the net over the entrance of the cave. They wait till the manticore returns, who is deliberately trying to bait them into the caves by going in at higher tide. Sigmar manages to do it without falling over and drowning in her plate armor but is soaked through and gets hypothermia. The manticore easily pushes the net out of the way and the rowan berries are washed out even if they only would last two hours anyway.

Another tide cycle passes while Sigmar recovers by the open fire and dries her clothes and wings. Seeing this, they leave Yrestor and the rowers atop and head down during lower tide to fight it. They find the caves alternate between higher dry passages and lower wet ones. The guess correctly the higher passages are traps of some sort as the manticore only uses the wet ones. The manticore uses them to corral mercenaries who escape the high tide in the caves and kill them later.

They see a tight turn and a skeleton with an iron spike through it, they are ambushed by the manticore flinging spikes. Fortunately, Sigmar’s plate armor blocks all damage as she leads from the front. Realizing the manticore was leading them deeper on, they retreat to a high dry cave and wait for the manticore to look for them next tide cycle. What follows is a drawn-out affair, as the manticore can almost never penetrate the plate, slightly hurt the people behind with the spikes and they can almost never penetrate the supernatural AP bonus of +6 (total AP 1d8 + 4). Not even the arrival of Yrestor turns the tide.

Eventually they wear it down by 1 damage at a time to 3/4s HP and it flees through the caves. Sigmar makes a grab for it but cannot hold on. They follow it to its lair, where they continue to flail back and forth. A lucky critical hit from Milkas Domonkos did 8 damages and brought it to 1 HP, severing its front left leg and sending it into unconsciousness. Quickly they stabilize it and drag it out. Taking it to Dorbog with a travois they make out of straggler trees.

On the way they meet a druid and 12 fanatics, seeing what they did they stayed clear of the players but the druid warned that some things are best left untouched. As a general way of regaining his composure and authority. At Dorbog, they are met by the Druid Mish, who cuts away the man’s face from the dog and sticks it back on what he now recognizes as Dongal, the treasure hunter. He then kills the dog, saying this is so the druids remain part of the story. He sneers at Dongal for messing with things like tombs and leaves after reciting the “poem” from Monsters &, the party don’t feel articualrly charitable as they think Dongal could have caused his own misfortune. Dongal doesn’t know what caused the dog to steal his face, it might have been a working dog he set loose in the ruins of Donenashoe as a distraction when cornered by the children.

When the party find the reward had been stolen long ago, they demand Dongal serve them until it was paid off, 2 SP a day. He protests and lists all the treasure sites he knows; the dragon’s island, the true location of Donenashoe the party walked past, the barrows and the pirate’s landing cove in the east. Also to beware the gargoyles and they were men who sought to leave mortality behind. but that doesn’t cover his debt in the party’s opinion. They return to the cave to collect the treasure.

Stormbringer Wolves Upon the Coast Session 3

 The party paid their crew and set down the river. They decided to fish as they sailed to keep the rations high. Sigmar flew up when they saw stones by the eastern riverbank and could see the stilt houses of the druid-supporters in the distance but they didn't stop. Observing the land,she reported some hills to the south east and the rest forest.

When the karvi could not go any further, they beached it on the west bank and left the griffons and four rowers to guard the boat. Yerestor stayed becuase his player was late. They headed in a south-earterly direction as they could see it was more open, but boggy.

Travelling across the bogs they saw the spring and the animal carcasses piled into it. The bog mummy king and his 12 skeletons emerged from the pools and there was a stand off, the party were clearly foreigners but not Invaders or Norse. So the undead king motioned for Sigmar to remove her clealry foreign armour (as it couldn't really speak) and lay it as an offering. The party objected to that and motioned her to keep it on, since it was clear the undead were posioning the river. Once they had gone back and forth arguing, the king lost patience and order his retinue to attack.

The battle was a real slog. The supernatural HD was easiest to represent by adding another 6 AP onto the mummy, but the skeletons taking only 1 point of dmaage was changed to half-damage, due to the higher HP. Sigmar kept switching between her different weapons, using two of the 8 rowers with them to carry her pike. She repeatedly had the Eyebiter thrown at her, and towards the end got hit. She finally dispatched the mummy with her two-haned axe.

While this was happening, Althrow Tams had realised that they could weaken all 8 of the attacking skeletons by using beothony to weaken the undead, reducing their attack and parry and making them mosly ineffective.

Jogrill Borson realised that he had no armour and no apprecitive dex as he was still healing from his fight with the Bonethief. While engaged with four skeletons, he attempted to run and failed. He was chopped to bits by the skeletons. Four of the rowers moved to engage and the party bemoaned they would have to pay them as marines.

After a long fight, lasting many rounds, the remaining skeletons disengaged and hoisted the body of their inert king and bore him away. Losing 1 HP per round untl the party found them all inert.
Looting was good as eyebiter was distinctly silver and the neckalaces (I described them as torcs) were surely worth a bit.

They pulled the cracasses out of the river and spent a fogy night following it. Chosing it over a tower south or the hills north. Reaching Dorbog, they announced what they did and showed the torcs and Eeyebiter to Donnagh and Mish. Mish the druid healed them with the blood ritual and advised them that some things are best left buried. His control of Donnagh was obvious. The party was directed down to the docks where a repalcement might be found and men had been talking about magic.

They found the viking drinking alone. Althrow Tams was incensed at how it cost 70 sp to buy enought drinks. Was informed how to gain magic from a beloved horse.

Stormbringer Wolves Upon the Coast Session 2

 This was much longer as we didn't spend an hour and a bit creating characters and then repeating this as each player got stuck or came in late.

Standing outside the drystone house of the Bonethief, they debated what to do and decided to burn the wooded door down. They did so, piling driftwood and watching the colours. The fire ignited the fat and methane from the boneless carcasses inside. The Bonethief charged out and the party realized they forgot to set a trap; Jogrill Borson’s arrow did 1 point of damage. Bonethief laid about with his sack of bones and treasure. The players engaged with it while directing the crew to throw the bones into the fire, but most went to the sea or away. As they thought that would weaken his power. On the first swing, a critical parry spilt the sack open, scattering the treasure across the sandy grass. The Bonethief’s fists were deadlier than the sack. Critically hitting the hunter Jogrill Borson, and giving him a major wound, yet merely a scar. Luck for he had no Dodge anyway.

Another blow was a critical hit to Sigmar the Myrryh axewoman, though parried, the blow splintered the Seaxe and sent the axehead into the surf. She switched to her Filkharian pike carried by the crew. She struck it twice more, the second time killing the Bonethief. Between the strikes the Bonethief roared he was immortal and owned all the bones in the world.

After his death, the crew gathered the treasure, awed and not stealing any. The Bonethief had a hand cut off and the body rolled into the fire. With the treasure, the party returned to Stamullen. On the way it was dark, and they met a merchant with his guards going to buy honey. They slept in the central space. They were hailed as heroes, though the Druid explained that after the day before and the merchant, they couldn’t feed them all again. The merchant bought the wolf pelts and gave them an IOU to be exchanged in Culemwardern. Sigmar bought a two-handed axe off a guard.

On the way back to the Karvi, they were about to run out of food. They split into hunting parties. Jogrill Borson found an elk, Althows Tams found nothing, and Sigmar found boar and the griffon. Sigmar, was spying from the air, and she flew off the fight it. Dangerous because she wasn’t wearing armour to be light. One spear from her group of crewmen hit the griffon. The elk gored a crewman who fumbled his spear toss, though not a major wound. The middle party rolled a d2 and was closer to the griffon, but the player lacked a bow. Yerstor the noble Yerstor the dumb Lormyrian noble guarded the boat (his player was busy until halfway through).

Sigmar parried the griffin’s two successfully attacks, at 53% and 33%. She struck it and tried to use a tumble skill to move on to, she did, and the player complained the height advantage penalties to the griffin weren’t worth it at -5% to attack/parry. I agree as they were better in RQ 2^nd edition at -20%, but the rules didn’t change.
Above the griffin, Sigmar struck it three times, relying on a major blow to drop it’s DEX below hers. She killed and made a good impression on the crew. The Hunter finally brought down the deer with a bow.

The processed the carcasses, skinning the griffin pelt and boiling the head to get the skull. 13 bandits arrived, the Fenians, but they saw they were outnumbered, and the party were monster hunters and left. It took a couple of days, probably should have taken longer.

The party sailed around the cape, saw the killer whale and thought it was dead, an arrow hit a fin to see if it would explode from the gasses and it moaned. They party got out and spent the rest of the day trying to drag it back into the sea while the water turned red, and the sharks gathered. The whale limped off. The sea god will remember this for ill, but I didn’t tell them that.
They passed the shoals and Althrow Tams hear the griffin chicks in the fog with a  Listen roll and critted a See roll to see the nest. They toed the boat to the rocks and the crewmen fished while Sigmar flew up with a rope. I broadly hinted at the four chicks could be tamed and Althrow Tams came up we the idea of riding them. Yerstor followed up and tried to tame a chick, it bit his left ring finger off (2 on a d10, left to right). I said it was because he had taken his gloves off to climb the rope. When moving the chicks down he did it and his armour protected him. The chicks made quite a noise in the boat and fouled the deck.

When they sailed into Culemwardern, the town emptied to see them, Sigmar gave a speech, but Althrow Tams had to translate. With her wings outstretched, Sigmar inspired the Christian populace. Cerion was less convinced and in a closed meeting wanted to know if she was an angel or a Valkyrie and was not too shocked to find she was merely a wing human(species?).
he explained what the party had done for them, and warned the party the griffin chicks were monsters yet to grow. He filled them in on Donashoe and explained it was upriver and they party should not land on the east bank as it was druid territory.

The party decided the griffins would probably be disruptive and get violent with each other. They killed the two chicks which seemed the less trainable to sit for a fish. The youngest two. They debated buying a second karvi or upgrading to a knar but saw the prices. Also how much it would cost to feed everyone with trail rations and the crew said they were willing to follow them, but wanted their wages when they finished with each expedition, even as non-combatants the money was going to go quickly. The party idlily debated sailing out and sinking the ship with the crew on it but realised only one of them could naturally fly. Finances were to be done net session.

Stormbringer for Wolves Upon the Coast

 Has it really been seven months, my writing project which I thought I would be pasting in here as I went turns out to be a bigger task than I thought. Though I went overboard and put in so many articles I think I might not get all of them in before the second week of December, much less all I planned.

 

But I started a solo AD&D game, the Great Greyhawk Campaign, which is paused because I can do that solo and have other things I needed to do.

But a campaign I am playing is Stormbringer 3E meets OSR darling Wolves on the Coast. I started it with my group when my poor attempt at running Mutants & Masterminds 3E's introductory campaign: Emerald City Knights fell apart.

 

Just had to tweak a few things. As Stormbringer characters are stronger and more capable. So, the origins have to adjust.

 

You are stuck in a rolling vessel, tossed about the waves. Cursing every minute you were tasked to this wretched realm.

You captain demanded a hefty fee to board, and a hefty ransom to let you off, and another for your weapons and armor.

The fool lies dead at the bottom and the law of the sea means the ship is yours.

Sharing a small raiding vessel (Karvi) with twelve rowers, ex-thralls who look to you for leadership. There is enough food and water for all hands to survive for four days. You have travelled two days from the home of your captor

 

Anyway, session 1 of Stormbringer meets Wolves Upon the Coast was truncated as I had to wait for everyone to make their character, someone to join partway through and them to make a character.

Goal was to bring plane into fold for Junction of a Million Spheres. Find lost city which was either on Atlantis or Ruislip. Perform Music to summon The Noise.

The boat visited the vegetation island, didn't like the pointing plants.

Encounter was Griffin, decided that was probably too bad for first session and had it flying back to nest. Party knows it nests somewhere north of Ruislip.

Slept in boat off coast, was awakened by Bandits, who challenged them, dumb noble stood up and agreed to pretty much everything including paying them off, twice after the Myyrrhn revealed her wings and the Fenians decided she was a "church spirit". 180 sp from his 600 sated them.

Walked about in day, met some kids tending cattle who told them about the Bonethief (ogre) and Corpse-Men (orcs). Noble may be dumb but lied successfully that Myyrrhn woman was wearing cloak of griffon feather since they had slain it.

wandered up to farthest point of coast due to bad directions from shepherd kids.

Went to Stamullen and met druid, nice and polite, learned plant magic, though they did note among themselves, that the peaceful intent to the druids was guaranteed on druids liking them. Stayed night.

Directed to ogre's house, now approaching, ogre inside.