MEGadungeon play report: session seventy-seven

20 Feb, 2024

MEGadungeon is my long-running 5E game played over Discord voice chat; it is also an experimental victim of my descent into OSR madness in recent years. The "ideal gameplay loop" has been generally consistent: enter a ruined city filled with undead monsters (and other horrors, of course), pointcrawl-navigate through sewers or city streets, and then dungeon crawl at various smaller PoIs. However, the specifics of play have evolved alongside my tastes. My players have been utterly graceful in putting up with my constant tweaks to what once ought to have been a very different game of D&D 5E; our current configuration is a far cry from the originally pitched buzzwords of "4E-like tactical combat" and "big Dark Souls-like boss fights."

The Game in Brief

First, the required lore dump. The game is set in Capital, an Early Modern city loosely based on Rome + Venice + Barcelona, and the ancient Weeping City at its heart: in antiquity the capital of the not-Roman empire, before falling to a magical cataclysm—a cataclysm no one remembers. Anyone within the city walls was killed and raised as an undead monster; a storm rages eternally above. Recently a way was found inside the fantastically impenetrable city walls and a gold rush-esque "adventurer economy" has formed. The players are adventurers intent on reclaiming ancient imperial wealth.

The tension between the dungeon exploration and the outside politics is the driving source of drama in the game thus far. Many factions want the wealth and magic of antiquity. In fact, we've perhaps spent just as many sessions outside the dungeon as actually dungeon crawling. This past session was one of them. (We actually haven't been in the dungeon proper since the middle of December, actually.)

Session Seventy-Seven

There's an unimaginable amount of context that could be shared ahead of this play report, but frankly I don't care to give it—this essay, beyond the brief overview of the game above, will mostly focus on my referee retrospective of the session, rather than such inane topics as "lore" or "plot." Allow the briefest of party rosters to suffice:

Elio: 7th-level Eldritch Knight Fighter (played by Claire). The last remaining original member of the party.

Alessi: 6th-level Order Cleric (played by Hannah). Originally a secondary character in play solely while Hannah's primary character was temporarily out of the picture. (That's why they're a level below the other PCs.) Now a permanent fixture for reasons you'll soon see.

Kallisto AKA "Kat": 7th-level Moon Druid (played by Nat). New character introduced after Nat's old PC retired from play.

"Striga": 7th-level Hexblade* Warlock (played by Mer). New character introduced alongside Kat after Mer's previous character—an original member of the party—recently died.

Roscoe: 5th-level Fighter (NPC retainer).

*Mostly.

The session began with the party arriving in Dockard, the area of Capital that acts as the main district for naval trade and other oceanic commercial activity, at 7:30 a.m. and amidst a torrential downpour. They have come to Dockard anticipation of the arrival of Salvador, Hannah's previously-primary PC, who has been on a naval journey for some time.¹ Unbeknownst to the characters, they were late by an hour—Salvador's ship arrived in Capital at 6 a.m., and this was something the players were already deeply aware of. Session seventy-six was actually focused entirely on Salvador's return to Capital, and his duel versus the viking Ragnarr Silvertongue, a fellow adventurer who fancies himself a Beowulf-figure and who has turned into somewhat of a nemesis of the party.² A mistimed ship schedule, an early arrival, a downpour that prevented the ship from properly docking, and failed Constitution saving throws to cast a sending spell despite some broken ribs were all RNG moments that resulted in Salvador facing Ragnarr Silvertongue in a duel alone. Ragnarr won that duel; Salvador was killed. (I'm pretty happy with this, as an aside. I think the odds were determined in a grounded/"realistic" way and stakes were properly conveyed. And in the end it felt like a death resulting from player actions rather than insurmountable odds or bad RNG.)

To digress—the characters know that Ragnarr has been waiting in Dockard for Salvador to arrive and Salvador is meant to arrive today, but they're unsure of the specific timing. There was a moment here where the characters arrived in Dockard and while the players knew what had gone down, the characters didn't—I felt like there was some tension between playing the characters with their limited knowledge versus wanting to "get on with the game" and the eventual confrontation with Ragnarr by the rest of the party, once it is revealed that Salvador lost the fight. I'm not sure how to solve this in the future, because I think it's important to have that division between player knowledge and character knowledge—it might just be a tension inherent to trying to compartmentalize information in that way.

Eventually, the group decides to investigate another lead they have while "waiting for Salvador to arrive." The last remnant of Ragnarr Silvertongue's once-crew of vikings is the necromancer Frida, named Frida Halfhand by Ragnarr after her first dungeon delve. She is smitten with him and utterly charmed by his heroics. (Seemingly so, at least. She's a wizard, after all. Who knows what game of 4D-chess she's actually playing.) Kat spoke with some local seagulls hiding from the storm in the eaves of a nearby warehouse in order to see if they had seen Frida's puffin familiar nearby. (They were plied with promises of food.) After getting a confirmation from the birds that the puffin has been seen, the party deduced that Frida must also be camped out nearby, because in order to see through her familiar's eyes she has to be relatively close by. Kat cast locate creature in order to pinpoint her exact position—a very smart move. Here, the party splits. Half go pursue Frida, while half stay on the docks proper.

It is a common move for the party to either use Striga's imp/owl familiar or Kat's "wild companion" feature to summon a familiar to scout ahead for danger, to see what's ahead, or to just generally engage with things while safely at a distance. I find this sort of thing terribly frustrating—not because I want them to be in danger constantly or to not play to their advantages, but because there's practically no downside to doing so. Find familiar is a spell that anyone who can take it in 5E really should, but its existence is one of the greatest of my (fairly common) moments of frustration with the game we're playing. In order to canvass the area around the building they pinpoint Frida as being hidden inside, Striga sends her owl to look for points of egress. Because of the storm, the owl can't fly very well, so it just ends up hopping around on nearby roofs, where it comes face-to-face with Frida's puffin. They've been made; the wizard knows someone's coming.

We cut back to Elio and Alessi at this point, who've elected to stay on the docks and continue watching. They do some investigation of the dock nearby where Salvador's ship ought to arrive, and see that a local tavern is full of sailors stuck inside until the weather is in such a condition to, well, sail. They ask around to see if anyone knows anything, or have seen Ragnarr, and I mention that there's a group of sailors complaining about the fact that they're stuck here for a while yet; docked ships haven't been able to leave port, so arriving ships are stuck anchored in the bay, even if they've arrived on time. I mentioned this because I thought it could be a justification for the characters to come to the realization or at least begin to think about something the players are already familiar with: Salvador has already arrived. This wasn't as clear as I intended or perhaps the players just weren't looking for a justification; either way, Elio and Alessi just continued to watch the water and wait for something to happen.

That something happened about fifteen minutes later. I had timed out the morning before the session began and was tracking time the party spent on the docks, so at 7:45 a.m. when Striga and Kat were further inland pursuing Frida, Ragnarr had finished his short rest on the deck of the ship in the bay after killing Salvador (which happened at around 6:45 a.m.) and returned to shore via rowboat. A failed perception check meant that Elio and Alessi only saw Ragnarr approaching shore about a hundred feet from the docks—the ocean swells and downpour concealed his passage. Thus Elio and Alessi only intercepted Ragnarr after he stepped from his rowboat onto the dock.

Their confrontation began with words—Ragnarr proclaimed himself victorious in a duel versus Salvador and presented the man's vihuela as proof of his death. Ragnarr then continued to state his intentions to leave Capital and return to his people.³ There was an offer to part ways and for the problem of Ragnarr to be solved without the closure of vengeance, though of course there would also be no risk of death, injury, or other consequences. Elio blocked Ragnarr from walking any further; he decried Ragnarr for his acts and collateral damage, then stated his intent to avenge his friend. Elio gave Ragnarr two options: get right back on that rowboat and row himself back to his home two seas away, or stand and fight. Ragnarr chose the second option.

The fight was adjudicated on a battle map using Roll20. Everyone was excited and engaged during the battle, but I sometimes felt the dissonance between the still Roll20 map where the tokens weren't moving much (it wasn't a "tactical" combat where characters were forcibly shifting other tokens in chess-knight-Ls or applying a wide range of status effects every turn) and the mental image of the fight I had in my mind: Ragnarr attempting to close distance in order to stab Elio with his two knives, while Elio was trying to force Ragnarr back to both fully utilize the length of his longsword and deny Ragnarr any room to manehouvre at the end of the pier. To me, this fight was contrasted with the very cinematic fight just last session—another duel with Ragnarr, but this time between him and Salvador—conducted completely via the theatre of the mind. In that fight, I felt more able to access the scene and leverage the fictional situation in combat (Ragnarr attempted to press Salvador up against the ship's mast, and he tackled him off the side of the ship and into the waves at one point). The Roll20, though the battle map was pretty and detailed, only served to remove me from the fiction. I spoke with the players about this after the session, and they mentioned that the Roll20 is a helpful visual tool for them to imagine the scene, as well as to help track the positioning of everyone on the battlefield, especially in more complicated situations. I cannot deny its help in this regard, and I certainly agree to some extent. I especially appreciate the HP and AC trackers the Roll20 tokens provide. There's not really a conclusion to this thought; my feelings on grid combat versus theatre of the mind are complex and hypocritical at the best of times.

The fight between Ragnarr and Elio was quick and brutal, especially for 5E combat. It helped that there were so few participants, in that regard. It was pretty tense, too: if Alessi wasn't there to heal Elio, Ragnarr would have certainly slain him, but in the end Elio avenged his Salvador and killed Ragnarr Silvertongue. One last note on the fight is that Ragnarr was accompanied by four zombies who were animated by Frida; the cleric turned two, but two remained after Ragnarr died. Gauging the momentum of the fight, I ruled that the remaining two zombies collapsed alongside Ragnarr. Though this decision was one made due to pacing and mood rather than a proper accounting of the reality of the secondary world as established ahead of any player engagement, as I so often try to base my decisions on, upon further reflection I stand by it as a choice. Some number of sessions ago I had envisioned Frida being the one to control the zombies and that she'd always be present with them, and so I had noted down that they would collapse if she died. It became clear over time, however, that Frida herself would not always be with Ragnarr while they acted as a guard; she thus bound the zombies to Ragnarr and he, at the time of the fight, served as their master. It makes enough sense to me that they'd then collapse when Ragnarr died, since command was transferred to him.

The party then took Ragnarr's jewelry (gaining much-needed funds and XP for it, to boot!) and Elio took his head. He then approached the nearby tavern and presented it to the sailors there; Elio declared Ragnarr an outlaw, arsonist, and murderer, and proudly claimed to have killed Ragnarr as an act of vengeance for his slain friend. As a Vestenmannavnjar, Ragnarr is technically an outlaw and unprotected by the law, so it's not a crime for even a foreigner like Elio to have killed him; there might be trouble from some more civilized factions when they hear an adventuring party is pursuing vigilante justice, but the rough-and-tumble sailors were impressed with the tale. People will certainly talk about this in the future. Elio should anticipate a strongly ambivalent public reaction.

This speech is where I should have ended the session, but at this point we had only played for two and a half hours and we usually go for three, so I swapped us back to Striga and Kat pursuing Frida. (As a reminder, timeline-wise, none of the three of them know about Salvador or Ragnarr's fates.) This was a mistake, in hindsight. The momentum was gone and we were tired from the dopamine, adrenaline, and catharsis of finally getting rid of a thorn that had been in the party's side since May of last year. And, as it turns out, the party wasn't actually sure what they wanted out of pursuing Frida.

Striga and Kat (and Roscoe!) turned themselves invisible and were able to track Frida to the abandoned building she's currently cooped up in, but couldn't see in because of the shuttered windows. They were also unwilling to try the doors, for fear of traps, and so simply waited outside for some time. Frida's puffin familiar had seen the owl familiar, but never saw the humans before they turned invisible; Frida knows someone's nearby, but not who and not where. The puffin was doing rounds outside and it was only a matter of time before someone got spotted. There was about fifteen minutes real-time of back and forth about what to do, interrupted by me trying to drive the action by reminding them that they shouldn't really be able to talk, because they're trying to be stealthy and are also invisible, but that attempt failed and the table just turned to quiet uncertainty instead. The party didn't want to approach Frida with quick violence because they A) didn't want her to be hostile to them, because they aren't sure if she is hostile to them or if it's just Ragnarr that is and B) especially with the party split, aren't sure they can take a wizard on her home turf. So they were just watching and waiting to see if the situation would change. Eventually, I realized that this wasn't going anywhere and gave the group two options: either they act before the puffin locates them by the invisible-person-outlines in the rain, doing whatever it is they'd like to do, or they act when the puffin locates them and Frida reacts however she'd react. It is at this point that Nat takes action on her realization that there's no good reason for them to be here in the first place, for the reasons listed above, and decides to just leave. Striga and Roscoe follow after her, and we finally end the session, with Frida still holed up and unmolested in her lair.

Next session: mourning Salvador and the aftermath of killing Ragnarr Silvertongue. How will Frida react when she learns of Ragnarr's death? What's the party's plan next? Will we finally return to the dungeon?

#5E #MEGadungeon #play report