West King's Field Campaign Report #3

 

World Building and Dungeon Delving

    What you're looking at is a draft of the campaign map I made last night. I tried not to go super detailed but I wanted to give myself enough of an idea of the area so I can begin planning war games primarily. A week ago I made up a wargame army using the Chainmail Medieval Miniatures rules but I've yet to design a scenario for them. Nevertheless I have an idea of the world I'm playing in now. 

    I decided to play something fairly lite and fun today. I broke out my dungeon tiles and used those to quickly generate a dungeon for my fighter to explore in. Note that the dungeon generated is not the main dungeon of Malborg Castle as that is still under threat by the Wyvern. Instead of going after the Wyvern initially as I did with my last character, I want this character to level up at least one level and find a few ally NPCs along the way before trying to storm the castle. 

Encounter #1- The Dwarf Fighter

The first being my fighter encountered was a dwarf fighter walking my direction from a long corridor. On the reaction table I rolled a positive reaction so I knew that the dwarf would not attack me. He warned me of a giant spider who is waiting for its next meal down the hallway and that going down that way would be suicide. He was a treasure hunter like me. He tried to take this route further into the dungeon but towards the north he encountered a few unfriendly skeletons which would have been a challenge by his lonesome. Now that he had found me, he wanted to join together to clear the way of the undead so that we both could venture past the giant spider. To this, I agreed. Although he had good armor on, he didn't have many hit points (that being a roll of 2hp). With an agreement to split the treasure gained 50/50 we pressed to the north to face the undead. 

Encounter #2- The Undead

The bodies of long-ago slain warriors littered the chamber to the north. As the dwarf and I entered we saw the bones begin to swirl around violently until they began to join together to form three skeletal warriors who armed themselves with battered, rusty weapons. This encounter looked scary but with some strategy it wasn't so much to handle. We pulled back to the narrow hallway so that we couldn't be easily overwhelmed by the skeletons who outnumbered us by one man. Having lined them up we hacked and slashed at them until they all crumbled into dust. I took a pretty bad would which brought me down to 2hp. Thankfully, my dwarf friend had some healing supplies on him and was able to restore most of my lost wounds.

Encounter #3- Ghouls

This encounter was really scary to come across. I've always struggled against ghouls in these OSR games because they are extremely powerful against low level characters. In some systems, ghouls can straight up murder your character with one failed saving throw. In White Box, however, they can paralyze you for 3d6 rounds if you fail a saving throw against them. It also doesn't help that they are 2HD monsters so they can be quite meaty. There were three ghouls to slay. Thankfully, I rolled low on their hit points so we were able to take care of them and I passed the saving throws needed to ensure that my character would not fall to paralysis. I could see why it would be so dangerous for a solo adventurer to traverse this dungeon. It was wise to team up with that dwarf. I don't know if I would have survived without that magic armor I won in the jousting tournament. 

Encounter #4- Dark Elves

Once again, another TPK waiting to happen. The two dark elves can surprise their enemies on a 1-4 result of a d6 roll. Their swords and crossbows are also coated with poison which could surely kill a level 1 character in just one hit. However, these elves had bigger fish to fry. I rolled a positive reaction on the reaction and worked out that they had come to this dungeon to slay an abomination to their race- a drider who had taken up a lair here. They hired the dwarf and I as extra muscle for their assault on the monster and promised us the drider's treasure. It was either be their meat shields or die by their hand right then and there, so the dwarf and I agreed to join them. 

Encounter #5- Drider

    We walked south down a hallway and reached a door that led to the drider's lair. The dark elves came up with a plan to sneak through the shadows into the lair and rain paralysis arrows on the drider- immobilizing it so that the dwarf and I could rush in with melee weapons and drain its 24 hit points with free attacks. The plan kind of worked. With the drider paralyzed the dwarf and I rushed in and chipped away a lot of hit points from it in the surprise round and the round that followed. However, the drider's paralysis faded and with one attack it killed my dwarf ally (I wanted to make him into a player character but that was the fate of the dice). The dwarf would be the only casualty of this fight, and my character would walk away with 30 gold coins paid to him and a bunch of exp for slaying a high-level monster. I thought maybe there could be much treasure and exp earned by working with these dark elves and I offered my services further. However they wished to part ways with my character after the battle. Therefore my character Geoffry returned home to the village of Backwood to rest and meditate on his most recent adventure. 

West King's Field Campaign Report #2

 Knights Tournament 

   

    For this game session I decided to play around with the jousting rules from Whitebox with the outcome of a tournament determining who shall be my next player character. I don't have much scenery to create a tournament yard in miniature form so I decided to do the whole thing with pen and paper minus the last two bouts of the tournament. Those last two bouts are a two versus two "sudden death" [they only knocked each other out] elimination fight and a final duel against the black knight of Ogre [an animated suit of plate armor +1]. 

The Prize

 

    The prize for this tournament was the black knight's magical armor. The armor is made of a dark steel. The runes within it allow it to fit like a glove to whoever binds to it by defeating it in single combat. The armor feels weightless to the one who wears it. The helmet is inscribed with a haunting face. Statistically, it counts as plate mail +1 and provides an AC of 17. It's last owner was a famous knight by the name of Grainwald who donated it to the lord regent of Ogre after he retired from the adventuring life. Before that there is a legend that the armor was forged by one of the sorcerer warlords who gifted it to his personal bodyguard. For seventy years the armor took on a life of its own and dared any knight to try to claim its power.

The Lists

    Two teams of knights were created for this tournament. The first few matches were elimination bouts of jousting atop light war horses. Each combatant's AC was 16 and their lances dealt 1d6 damage. When a knight's hp was reduced to 0 they were considered knocked out and unable to continue. Otherwise, a point would be scored if a hit was landed. After three bouts the one with the most points scored won. You can see the results of this stage of the tournament below.

The Team Fight

From team 1 Tidfe and Sige faced off against Geoffry and Hardu from team 2 in an arena-styled battle. Once again, no one was fatally wounded in the battle but it was fierce nonetheless. Hardu was knocked out very early on in the match which left Geoffry to fight off both knights for many rounds. By the grace of the gods he was able to overcome both knights and score a victory for his team. His real challenge was about to begin. 

Dueling the Black Knight

    Geoffry had one last challenge, and that was the tournament's prize itself- the armor of the black knight. The animated armor had 2HD and an AC of 17- which proved to be quite the challenge for a level 0 character, but Geoffry had courage. The two battled for little over a dozen rounds with neither wanting to give any ground to the other but at the end of the day Geoffry would prevail over the armor and bind to it. As the victor of the tournament, Geoffry claimed his prize of plate mail+1 and after a night of drinks and celebration he found himself at the strength of a level 1 fighter. As the sun broke over the horizon of the West King's Field- Sir Geoffry rode off towards adventure. 

The West King's Field Campaign Report #1

An Introduction

     This is the first game session for my new fantasy campaign, which takes place in my personal setting of West King's Field- which is an untamed frontier of wilderness just beyond the reach of the Kingdom of Ogre. I will be alternating between tabletop RPG and miniature war gaming rules to flesh out the campaign and will tell the stories of the campaign's events through this blog.

 

Humble Beginnings 

    To start off playing in my world I made a level 1 fighter using the rules from White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game. White Box is a remastering of the original Dungeons and Dragons rules powered by the Swords and Wizardry engine. It's by far my favorite RPG rule set and comes closest to what I desire out of a tabletop RPG. The fighter's character sheet was as follows:

I like to use a note card to keep track of my characters. It makes it a lot simpler to manage than a whole character sheet and can easily be discarded when no longer needed. I usually keep track of game notes this way too. The front I use to write down a character's stats and, on the back, I keep track of their inventory. 

Low-level Adventuring

    I am strict when it comes to playing games by their written rules, or at least making modification to rules when needed and sticking to them. Therefore, in order for my fighter to become a hero, he's going to have to survive his backstory. I didn't put too much complication into getting my game started. My fighter found himself in the village of Backwood, the last footprint of lawful civilization west of the Kingdom. There was a large bounty of 90 gold coins on the head of a troublesome wyvern who had nested at the nearby ruins of Castle Malborg.  To try to face the wyvern alone at such a low-level would-be suicide, therefore I was going to need the help of mercenaries to back me up. In order to get some coin, I decided to explore a small cave not far from the village to see if I could loot some treasure from the goblins rumored to be living there. 

    This is the map of a cave I quickly drafted up. I created it with a few random dice drops to give me the basic shape of the cave and filled it in using some terrain dice I have. Since this is a low-level, one-page "dungeon" I didn't think to put much detail into it besides what the randomized tables would give me. Firstly, the tables were not kind to me, as a ghoul was waiting for me at the entrance to the cave which chased me off. Thankfully I came across a level 2 magic-user NPC in the forest who was willing to help me out for some treasure. We ventured into the first chamber in the cave and fought off some tough gnolls and took their treasure- 180 gold coins which we split evenly. After I got back to Backwood I hired some mercenaries to help me kill the wyvern. 

 The Wyvern of Malborg Castle

    Legend has it that Malborg was one of the castles magically constructed long before the crowning of the first king of Ogre when sorcerer warlords battled endlessly with legions of summoned monsters for control over the Overworld. During the time of the campaign [1st day of the 4th month in the year 100] Malborg is nothing more than mysterious ruins. A wyvern was found nesting here by a pair of explorers who nearly lost their lives trying to flee from it. The image is a close representation of what my fighter and his soldiers would have seen as they approached the ruins. 

        The wyvern is a 7HD monster with 24 hit points, an armor class of 16, and poisonous tail which it would use 60% of the time to kill a foe. My strategy was to continuously volley missile fire at the wyvern to constantly chip away at its health while I led the charge with my halberdiers to engage it in melee. My plans didn't work as well as I hoped because the wyvern first targeted my missile troops and made quick work of them, forcing my melee fighters to play catch-up in order to deal some damage.  

    I had a real chance to slay this monster but sadly the dice would turn out of my favor once I got the creature down to 4 hit points. Long story short, my character was killed along with most of my mercenaries. The rest of the mercenaries lost their morale and fled back to tell the tale in the dimmest corner of the tavern back at Backwood. Such is the way of things in White Box.