Black Spaghetti Hack Session 04: Tollhouse Battle
And we’re back to it…
When last we left our knaves they had just learned the whereabouts of a great treasure and fled town ahead of a nobleman’s wrath. Their plan’s to find a chef who can tell them where the village with the treasure’s located. The party has the village name, but not it’s location. They also know the village was famous for its wine, hence a chef being the one likely to recognize the name.
I gave them three options of chefs and they headed towards the middlemost one. As they set out they gossiped with some farmers and learned some current events.
- Count Chico’s house blew up with Count Chico in it. (The party figured as much.)
- There are soldiers on the road ahead.
- The soldiers could be avoided by going over a hill, but a witch lives on the hill and is not always nice to strangers. Or the party could avoid the soldiers by cutting through a marsh, but that would bring them close to a reclusive family of
possible cannibalssausage makers.
(My rule of thumb’s been to give three options at each point, and while they’re not all combat, I try to make them all interesting and eventful. But, yeah, this whole give the party three options, then detail the one they choose thing is my loop for GM prep.)
The party opted to try and bluff their way past the soldiers and continued down the road.
They find a discarded pack near a sign post and Nicolo’s ambush sense starts tingling. The party approaches the pack with caution, and it opens to reveal a marionette with a crossbow. Other crossbow bearing mercenaries appear, including Toad-Faced Larry and his crew. The party tries to bluff, but learns they won’t be able to move farther south anyways because there’s a battle brewing for a toll house a short ways to the south. The marionette recruits them to his force and away they all march with Toad-faced Larry asking why the party wanted to talk to Gwardo Iznardo so bad. The party ignores his questions.
At the tollhouse, they see the Swansickles have mustered their own force, and Nicolo notices Tall Hat among some knights on the opposite side. There’s a small stream and bridge with the toll house across the bridge. The objective of the battle is to claim and hold the toll house.
(I ratcheted up the farcical nature of Renaissance warfare and make the military battles more drunken football matches than actual warfare. At least at first, later things change… but the party doesn’t know how or why yet.)
Battlelines form. A horn blows. The battle begins!
The enemy knights charge. Arrows fly. A band of brawl monks charges the knights. The bridge gets blocked by bodies. Don Hector leaps into the ditch to ford the stream. The dice hate him and he face plants. Ha’Des and Nicolo use their flame throwing abilities to good effect. The knights are routed and flee, Tall Hat with them. Nicolo curses. Don Hector makes it across the river. Ha’Des burns more things and pins down the enemy archers. Don Hector reaches the toll house. Ha’Des sees an opening on the bridge and sprints across. Nicolo takes cover and starts prepping his sleep box. Don Hector and Ha’Des defeat the enemy troops in the house. Nicolo’s box puts a large number of combatants to sleep.
The battle ends. The party’s side has won!
The party decides to spend the night with the mercenaries in the tollhouse. The party also bathes in the river, and I think this was when we developed soap landlordism with Ha’Des (I think) renting their soap to the others.
During the night, the party keeps ignoring Toad-face Larry, but gets more intel about the region.
- An old smuggler’s road crosses the river a few days north, but the woods around it are home to a band of ogres.
- In the south, the witches seem to be having some dispute over whether they should take part in the war.
The monks and the knights hate each other because the knights took over the monks’ monastery. - All around San Uzzano the armies are skirmishing, but the party should be able to make San Spotillo (the town with the chef they’re looking for) without a problem.
So, in the morning, that’s exactly what the party decides to do.
Temple of the Rafter Wights
Check out my itch page for a new adventure, Towers of the Rafter Wights:
The Scour: a once fertile valley destroyed by the wrath of an angry god. The god’s anger was so great that even now, centuries after their ascension, their wrath remains. First, in a corrosive mist that blankets the floor of the valley. Second, in the rafter wights, the once worshiped eternal godbirds, now doomed to a cycle of death and resurrection for all eternity by their negligent creator.
Once a century, the rafter wights rise from the valley floor, reborn from the dust of the Scour’s former cities. On the days of their rebirth, the wights rise above the mist before the sunlight sets them aflame. It is a marvelous sight that attracts birdwatchers and tourists from across the Metroscape. Now the time of rebirth approaches again, and one ornithologist hopes to capture a rafter wight and return home with it… alive.
Towers of the Rafter Wights is a birdwatching wilderness adventure, featuring a toxic mist-choked valley and doomed godbirds. It is written for Into the Odd, but can be placed in any weird fantasy setting.
Download it here: https://yesterweird.itch.io/towers-of-the-rafter-wights
Crypt of the Muscle Mummy: Touch the Void, You Turkeynecks!
Granted immortality in the long-distant Primeval Eons, the Muscle Mummies have returned from the depths of time. Now, by using state-of-the-art isolation technology, meditative void techniques, and body-numbing repetitive exercises, along with the traditional twin engines of guilt and shame, they offer to cultivate the void mind within anyone!
Including you!
Only by honing the body as well as the mind in the void’s furnace can anyone hope to achieve immortality. A hard task. But don’t worry, our personal trainers are here to help!
Crypt of the Muscle Mummy is an adventure location featuring undead fitness coaches. It can be placed in any metropolitan fantasy setting. You can find it here on my itch page at https://yesterweird.itch.io/crypt-of-the-muscle-mummy
Musical inspiration from the Novas.
THE WHISPERING HOUSE
Two day ago, Scrypthouse ZLX-1197 reported receiving a strange signal. Since then the house has gone silent. You’re to escort and protect the maintenance team sent to fix whatever went wrong.
That shouldn’t be too hard.
Right?
A 16-page investigative adventure for Electric Bastionland and other weird adventure settings. Includes inspiration for making living houses and a list of lexical diseases to amuse and frustrate players.
(This is an updated version of ideas initially presented in Mysthead 3.)
Favorite Reads 2023
A baker’s dozen of books I read and liked this past year. The last time I posted a list like this was in 2019.
The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck by Alexander Laing (1934)
A weird crime novel, and I mean both of those in their genre sense. It’s a murder mystery but for an audience that were teens who read Weird Tales. Strange things are a foot around a rural New England medical school. Odd experiments, diabolical research, and a despised professor harboring a dark secret. It’s good stuff with plenty of twists. For fans of mystery, mad science, and weird horror.
The Peripheral by William Gibson (2014)
A young woman in a rural near future USA comes into contact with a piece of technology that allows a signal to pass between her time and another one farther in the future after a series of disasters wiped out much of the human race. At first she thinks it’s just a job, but when she witnesses a crime in the future she’s suddenly caught in a power struggle that bleeds across time lines. This was neat. I liked the way time travel only allowed for signals to pass between eras. This meant people could basically Skype, remote operate machines, and engage in financial shenanigans, but those are more than enough to find allies and enemies in your own timeline. A bit light in the prose, but that’s no terrible crime.
Leech by Hiron Ennes (2022)
Sci-fi horror about a creepy doctor who is a single appendage in a vast parasitic colony organism that takes over human hosts and wears them as puppets. And the narrative voice nails that conceit completely. The plot is very Gormenghast by way of Dune with the doctor coming to treat an isolated monarch and his family as they navigate local political unrest caused by their cruelty. This one has a good chunk of gore and isn’t for the squeamish.
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler (2022)
A near future SF novel with a split narrative all centered around a group of researchers discovering an intelligent species of octopus off the coast of Vietnam. This has those good speculative touches like addictive AI companions and automated robo-vessels that relentlessly pursue their primary function regardless of the cost. This is a good starting place for anyone wanting to engage with modern day SF.
Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley (2022)
This is an SF novel that starts as a pastoral novel set in a society of intelligent raccoon-like creatures. From there it shifts into an espionage novel about UFOs. Imagine something like the X-Files but set in Tolkien’s Shire. That’s what this is. It’s neat, and the pastoral bits, which are mostly a travelogue, are really enjoyable.
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (1909)
Silly and over-the-top. I can get why the story has persisted for over a century now.
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell (2019)
This one is less a how-to unplug and more a history of unplugging. It’s smart, and points to not abandoning the world, but finding space enough to cultivate one’s own attention within the world. It also gives a brief history of social networking systems that I wasn’t been aware of before. Definitely give this a read if you want something stable to hold onto in our late stage capitalist world.
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014)
I remain a fan of the British Person Takes a Walk genre and this is a good part that with its descriptions of hawking in fields. It’s also a meditation on loss (Macdonald’s dealing with the death of her father) and an investigation into a literary icon (T.H. White who was also into hawks). As this was a very popular novel a decade ago, it’s likely you can find cheap copies now. It’s good.
The Absolute at Large by Karel Capek (1920)
A scientist makes a miraculous energy making machine that has the byproduct of unleashing divine particles into the world. These have the unfortunate side-effect of increasing fanaticism and sectarian strife. This is very much a light satire, but that it’s written in the early days of atomic research before World War 2, so it’s a bit prescient too.
Gunsights by Elmore Leonard (1979)
A later Elmore Leonard Western from the era when he was mostly writing crime novels. This is really something unexpected. On the surface, it’s about one thing (a range war with former allies now on opposite sides), but under that it’s a satire of something else entirely (the way media as often creates events rather than simply reports them). If you’ve never read a Western and want to start with one that’s a bit savvy and smart, this is the one.
Felicie by Georges Simenon (1942)
I’ve read a few Maigret novels and enjoyed them, but this was the first one where I _got_ what his deal was as a detective. Simenon uses his detective less to solve crimes as explore the psychology of the characters involved in it. So this reads not as an account of a crime and its solution, but as a psychological analysis of in this case the crime’s chief witness.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekara (2023)
Fetter was raised as a cult assassin with magical powers, but now he’s an adult trying to live in the big city and keep mind and body together by attending weekly group therapy sessions and avoiding whatever pogrom the government is currently conducting. It’s hard to describe this book, but it reminded me of Michael Cisco’s The Divinity Student as well as Samuel R. Delany’s novels Dhalgren and Triton, novels about young men arriving in cities that are simultaneously fantastic and mundane. It’s good.
Dance of the Tiger by Bjorn Kursten (1978)
This book rewired my brain a little bit. On the one hand it’s a speculative fictionalized account of the interactions between early humans and Neanderthals. Bits of the book are heavy-handed (the way Neanderthal’s speech is portrayed is so corny… but it works!), but after a while those bits are less jarring and the story that unfolds is fascinating. Both in a mythical/mystical sense and in anthropological sense. It really cemented this idea in my head that art-making, and by extension tool-making, are fundamental to humanity as a species, and if there’s any way back to the Garden of Eden it’s through competently making things with our hands. This is probably going to be one of those books I never shut up about if not stopped.
BLACK HACK BRANCALONIA
Our current Monster of the Week game will be ending this January (when more serious professorship resumes for the GM). This means I’ll likely be back in the GM’s seat sometime early next year. So I’ve been prepping a new campaign. This one will be a Brancalonia game except I don’t actually think Brancalonia is a good fit for 5E D&D.
In a game of down and out grubby adventurers nothing should have over 50HP. The brawling rules are neat, but maybe not necessary when characters are lower powered. For now I’ve decided to use Black Sword Hack/Fleaux! as my rule set. My prep’s mostly been just making a list of backgrounds, NPCs, and random tables for the setting. The heavy lifting will reside mostly in capturing the right flavor.
The idea’s to run a Good, the Bad, the Ugly campaign. The players will learn of some great treasure in adventure one and have to cross the map to get to it. Along the way shenanigans will occur. The goal’s to have it last between 5-10 sessions. I might even allow a bit of PvP at the end, so we can have a good old fashioned 3-way stand-off.
I’ll post details as it unfolds. If folks want the prep documents, let me know and I’ll put together a free PDF to download from my itch page.
More to follow.