Building Bhakashal - Adjudication and Exploration at the Table

So my Tuesday group is going through Barrier Peaks. As it’s such an odd module, it makes for a great case study on the challenges of refereeing. I find a lot of "examples of play" tend to ignore this aspect of the game, as it involves a lot of referee interpretation, and thus appears to be specific to a game rather than a general issue that many referees face.

Barrier Peaks is not like other modules. It is also being run with Bhakashal rules, so it allows me to show how you can seamlessly run 1e AD&D or OSR style materials with the setting.

First some context. My group is six players, all 12 year olds, they have between them 8 PCs, ranging from 5-8th level. They have a mix of classes, a 7th level slayer (ranger/assassin), an 8th level mercenary (fighter), a 5/5/6 muse (bard), a 7th level thaumaturge (thief/magic-user), a pair of arcane casters, a phantasmist (illusionist) and a warlock (magic-user), both 8th level, a pair of seers (clerics) of 5th and 8th level, and a moderate number of magic items. They have been playing some of these characters for 3 years.

A party of this level is dangerous and resilient, and has a lot of tools, particularly the seers, who are free casters and have access to the entire spell list for seers appropriate to their level, so the 8th level seer in the party has access to all seer spells from 1st to 4th level.  A Seer may cast 1 spell per day per level of experience, no matter the level of the spell, plus one spell per day per point of WIS bonus or CHA bonus, whichever is higher. Seers follow the “half casting, round up” rule, e.g. a 5th level seer can cast up to 3rd level spells, a 7th level seer can cast up to 4th, etc. Our highest level seer can cast 11 spells per day of up to 4th level, giving him access to 77 spells. 

So there are a lot of options there.

They took 4 sessions traveling from Bhakashal to the Crystalmist Mountains. Bhakashal is located in the Pelissio swamp on Greyhawk. They were 8 days at sea, 5 days on the river, and two days in the mountains to get to Barrier Peaks.

Last session they breached the ship, this is what they saw when they entered.

They went in to investigate the hallways, rather than the lift tube right in front of them. I’ve run this module many times, and every other time the PCs went straight for the tube where there is an unmarked level map on the wall. I put this in as the maps in the module are very cool, and the players love to look at them, I understand that this is a no-no for some people, but for me the impact on the group with a map to look at is worth it. It is unmarked however, so they still have a lot of guesswork ahead of them.

So away they went, sans map. 

The hallways alternate between lit and dark, they find rooms, some have key card access, others just push-button open. They investigate a few rooms, they are mostly ransacked and empty of anything of interest. I roll for each room to see if they find anything, odds are 1 in 6, and then the options are:

1. A salvageable simple item (e.g. brush, ruler, glass)

2. A broken non-lethal complex item (e.g. a scanner)

3. A key card 

4. A harmless monster (alien lizard, insect)

5. A skeleton of a crewmember (showing them to be 8ft tall with long arms and elongated skulls)

On the third room, paydirt! They find a journal from the crew. One Comprehend Languages spell later and they see the notes one crewmember (a technician) took discussing repairs to the engine and concerns about fuel. They LOVED that, even though it was likely completely useless to them. These sorts of small details with no direct game mechanical impact create the warp and woof of your world, so they have a big impact.

Now, at this point they realize they will likely be tossing a lot of rooms, and they expect there will be random encounters or locals that will find them eventually, so they decide to cast an Augury spell. Divination spells in D&D are a tough nut to crack, as you can’t know the future. 

The spell lets the players ask if a choice ahead of them will bring weal or woe. Here’s the thing, they were at a confluence of hallways, they cast Augury (which takes 2 rounds, so by that time another wandering monster check, negative!), and there are a few problems.

First, the spell as written only has a percentage chance of giving you correct information, and you don’t know one way or the other if it’s true. I find that ridiculous, it is a divination spell, if you can’t trust the result then what is the point of casting it? So in Bhakashal if you roll a fail on your Augury “the tea leaves do not tell a story”, or “the bones are silent” so the future is uncertain. If you fail that way you can recast, but there is no ambiguity to the result.

With that in mind, given the three corridors to choose from, and the party going down each, I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA which option will bring weal or woe. All held dangers, and it wasn’t clear which one was least threatening, and even if I could tell, as we all know, the least threatening thing can kill you if the dice aren’t kind. 

How do you handle this? 

If you play it BTB, they don’t know if the spell is accurate or not, so if things go south after they get a positive result, then they assume they failed the roll and got a false positive. In Bhakashal however, we roll in the open, so if the result is “good”, then it has to turn out good in some meaningful way. 

House ruling is like that, you take the good with the bad. BTB this problem doesn’t come up, but BTB the spell never got used at my table, as the results couldn’t be trusted. I don’t change dice rolls, so here is the solution I have used for the last 4 years of playing the Bhakashal version of the spell.

I let the situation play out. The extreme would be if the party suffers a complete loss (say a TPK) when it was supposed to be “good”. In such a case I would bring them back in some way with a disadvantage, and let them continue on to a potentially greater reward, which would be their "good result". 

In 4 years of repeated use of this spell in exploration, it hasn’t required this to happen. Why is that? For one of two reasons. One, as it happens, as long as the party finishes their particular adventure, or the next section of the adventure, with most of them still alive, that is considered a “win” by the players. I have had this happen several times. Alternatively, I have let the situation play out and eventually someone at the table will interpret a result as positive enough to justify the spell. So we went forward, and I trusted things to work out.

The Augury pointed them further into the ship, they hit two more rooms, on the second I roll a wandering monster check for a lurker above, I decide it is in the darkened hallway outside the room. They start to enter the room, it descends on the stragglers. The rest of them hear screams, turn and attack the creature, doing damage to their fellow PCs in the process. 

I had to improvise a mechanic for this, it is one that I cooked up for a plant monster that envelops their target, and there may be a rule for some monster somewhere in 1e that does this, I can’t remember! The rule we use is that someone stabbing a lurker above that is on top of other targets compares the “to hit” roll that hit the lurker to the AC of a random trapped PC, if it was a hit, they take half the damage that the lurker took. Fortunately they were blessed with a low HP roll for the lurker, so it went down quick. We roll monster HP live at the table when it is first wounded, so the low roll was met with sighs of relief, as several of the players were worried about suffocation.

One of them expressed concern that this was a bad outcome, a random monster attack, what about the Augury? Another player pointed out that they survived the attack and the lurker had low HP, which meant they were lucky. I don't generally argue with them, I let them do the work for me.

Now, as they travel I keep track of rounds and turns. Encounter checks happen per turn of exploration. Most combat takes about 3-4 rounds at most, Gygax suggests about a turn to search a room carefully, longer if it is particularly filled with objects. I generously assign a turn to search most rooms, as they have been thoroughly tossed by the ships inhabitants already and many things removed. They investigated about a half dozen rooms at this point. That’s 6 checks at 1 in 12 odds. 

I tell the players how it works, they know the odds of a wandering monster coming up, they know the time it takes to toss a room, the odds of something being found, and that there will be a 1 in 12 chance of an encounter every time they spend that turn. Knowing the odds reflects both their PCs maturity as adventurers, and makes the game fair. It allows the players to risk manage and resource manage their choices. it replaces mystery with known risks.

By this point they have come around in a circle to the drop tube and find a level map on the side. I took the original maps and modified them, eliminating many of the “staterooms” on level 1. There are over 200 UNKEYED rooms on level 1 of the ship. So I consolidated some of them, and added some others like a strange room with a huge engine of some sort, it pulses with radiation. There is a room with a chamber for testing materials using various rays and such. A room with a gigantic aquarium of alien fish. I also gave the map a cool green color, like an old-school computer screen.

When they found the map the party seer cried out that this confirmed the Augury, it was “weal” to go this way as they found the map! I would have suggested that if the player hadn’t brought it up, which would allow me to count for the spell’s prediction. Something like this almost always comes up on its own, which is why I don’t have to mess with things to make a positive result happen for any given Augury.  

They moved on with the map, and then the party phantasmist (illusionist) asked to cast one of their utility spells. I roll randomly for spell distribution, and they had found a Bhakashal 4th level phantasmist spell, Quen-Tharin’s Baleful Penetrating Gaze. The spell gives the phantasmist X-ray vision for 80 feet, so they can stand in one spot and turn slowly, seeing everything in a 360 degree circle of 160 foot diameter. I have some paper cutouts of spell AOE’s, so I put one down that was similar in size for the players to see on the map.

However, I also noted that the PC had never cast this spell before, and its use would be difficult. If you have never seen with X-ray vision before, it would be disorienting, and interpreting what you see would be difficult. Particularly in a tense, dangerous environment like this. Still, they agreed about the restrictions and wanted to give it a shot, so they cast the spell.

When a situation of adjudication comes up at our table, I map out an initial case and interpret the impact on the game mechanics, then the players chime in with objections or suggestions. It can take no time if they agree with me, but often they want to test the parameters of the case to see if they can gain an advantage, or at least dodge a disadvantage. We all have to agree to the odds and the rolls needed for it to move forward. 

In this case they all agreed it would be hard to do this, so I asked if they wanted to go fast and roll (e.g., make a save) to see if they could get lucky and interpret anything useful, or go slow and get more information, but increase the risk of dangerous random encounters. Everyone thought this was a fair choice, and after some chat decided on option B, as they didn’t trust the save. 

So I decided it would take 10 minutes to do a 360 degree circle slowly enough to stop and focus in on certain potentially interesting objects. We all agreed to that, I rolled for a potential encounter, none came up, and I then reported on three “interesting” things the phantasmist noted beyond mundane objects like chairs and such on the sweep.

The phantasmist saw the room with the pulsing engine and one stateroom with a large object inside, which was behind a key card door. 

They decided to investigate the room with the strange engine. They entered the room, and I described it to them, pulsing with a bright blue energy (that was a tip of the hat to Cerenkov radiation), they sniffed around then decided to leave, taking a turn to check the room. I described interfaces, ports, tools of various kinds, this took a turn. I rolled for random encounters, none came up.

They left that room and went to the room with the object inside. It looked in X-ray vision like a “cylinder or barrel with appendages on the side and some sort of snout on the top”. They were interested enough to go to the room and found it behind a key card.

Well, they weren’t having any of that.

When the PCs brainstorm a situation like this I start my phone timer, we go real time. They discuss spells, sometimes we look them up to see what they will and won’t do, and if any adjudication is needed. All this is real time, and I roll for wandering monsters at the 10 minute mark.

This makes for focused and fun discussion. 10 minutes is a fairly long time to work out an idea, but the tension makes it interesting. They decided against Flame Strike, which one of the seer’s had on a scroll, and ruled out Magic Missile on the assumption that MM only works against creatures, not things, so it wouldn’t damage a door. They suggested either casting Strength on the party tank so they could smash the door with a lucerne hammer, or casting Heat Metal on the door to melt it. Note, Seer’s in Bhakashal get a spell from another class that is attuned to their deity’s sphere of influence rather than extra spell slots for their wisdom bonus, one of the Seers worships a god of smiths and weapon makers, so he has heat metal as one of his “extra” spells. 

We consulted the spell descriptions and it doesn’t suggest anywhere that the target metal is damaged, just really hot, so I suggested that was a “no”. However, one of the players asked what would happen if they added a Burning Hands to the heat metal? Burning Hands doesn’t do much damage in 1e AD&D, it is primarily a fire starting spell. However, it releases a concentrated blast of searing hot flame for a full minute’s time (the duration of the spell), so I decided that combining the spells would require the door to make a saving throw versus fireball to avoid melting. That’s a 6 on a d20, so it wasn’t very likely to work. However, I added that a second casting of both spells immediately after would double that save to a 12, and a third right after casting would triple it to a 18. 

Since Bhakashal warlocks are free casters, they don’t have to memorize specific spells each day, they memorize all spells they have permanently, with caps on the max number of spells based on level and INT. So they can “spam” spells like this, just like a seer can, it just takes time. Heat metal is 7 rounds long plus casting time of 4 segments. So two castings will be two wandering monster checks, three castings will be three checks (21 rounds, just over the line).

At this point we have a wandering monster check as they have taken 10 minutes talking this out. Nothing came up.

Then the party warlock suggested he try his Shocking Grasp, perhaps this would short circuit the doorway mechanisms. That’s a bit metagamey, but I’m find with a bit of that, shocking something with electricity to open it up isn’t an entirely unreasonable suggestion, even to someone with no knowledge of electronics. 

Then, the party mercenary, who has no spells, asks if you can reverse Heat Metal. 

Boom.

No one at the table had thought of this. To be honest, I wrote down a list of spells that might be tried out on a door and didn’t even think of Heat Metal, I considered Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Shocking Grasp, Magic Missile, Cone of Cold and the various Bigby’s Hand  spells, as well as Flame Strike. I had not counted on Chill Metal. Another important reminder, AD&D, and Bhakashal by extension, is a big, complex game, you won’t think of everything.

Chill metal, plus some physical force, was a winner in my mind. 

This is also why it is important to remember that you are challenging the players, not the PCs, as any player can come up with a cool idea, or remember that some spells can be reversed, not just the player of the PC with the spell. 

So I looked at the saving throw for magical frost, my best bet in the rules, and it’s a “1”. It made sense, the door won’t shatter if you just freeze it, but it didn’t make sense for the party’s odds to shatter the door. So I decided that casting the spell would force the door to make a crushing blow save when it was hit in a chilled state. The save is a “6”. Not great for the party, but you can smash it as often as you like.

They immediately suggested that the PC should be able to smash it dozens of times in a row and break it more or less immediately. I suggested instead that they would have a limited number of powerful blows in a single round, as the door was cold, not completely brittle, and it is hard to repeatedly smash something with a lucerne hammer. 

How many blows per round? There is no ruling for this that I am aware of, so I decided to make it easy and say 1 strike per level of the mercenary per round. How would I determine if the door shattered? I decided on the spot to base it on the Bhakashal criticals system. If the strike was a critical hit, the door had to save versus crushing blow. 

In Bhakashal you roll to hit, add all your mods, and you get a critical on a 25 or higher. The door was AC 2 (like full plate armor), you add the AC of your target, your level based attack bonus, your STR bonus and any magical modifiers, plus WvrsAC mods, and that’s your to hit roll modifier. Roll and add this, if you get 25 or higher, you have a critical hit.

For this mercenary the bonuses were:

Fixed 

+4 level

+2 STR

+1 magic

Variable

+2 AC

+1 WvsAC

Total: +10

So on a roll of 15 or higher, they get a critical on the door. 

They cast the spell, and the party mercenary attacked the door. They rolled a miss, a hit but not a critical, a critical but successful save, a miss, a hit without critical, then on strike 6 a critical and a failed save, and the door was destroyed.

However, they had just made a ton of noise, so I rolled a 1 in 6 chance a security bot was near. Nothing there, but I also rolled 4d4 to determine how long it would be until one showed up, you don’t make that kind of noise and not draw attention. 

10 rounds.

They got through the door, and they found this.

There were tools scattered around and the robot was obviously damaged. They discussed what to do, and decided to try and turn it on somehow. Gygax included rules for your PCs figuring out complex technologies, I have Bhakashal rules for this, but in this case we used what came with the module, so the players could see how it worked. This was a worker droid, technically the tables are for tools, not robots, but I decided to apply them anyway. Since this was a worker droid, it was "non-lethal" but complex.

The tables allow you to “simulate ignorance” on the part of the PCs. When they try to figure out the tech, they roll on tables to see if they can grok it, or if they discharge power, or even destroy the tech entirely. The PC rolls a d10, with a deduction for high INT, and lower results are better. If you have figured out one piece of tech you get additional deductions. The two party arcane casters with the highest INT tried it first. One player tried it and after about 10 rolls gave up. Another one tried it and burnt out one of the robot’s power cells. They continued and burnt out another. Putting caution to the wind they continued and caused it to destruct. Due to the explosion they had to roll a save versus death for half of 4d10 damage. 

That came within 3 hp of slaying the party Thaumaturge. 

They quickly healed him with a Cure Serious Wounds. In Bhakashal, when you heal someone you temporarily lose the same number of HP that go to your patient, so between this and two post lurker above Cure Light Wounds, the party Seer insisted they stop and shelter for a time.

The party ranger suggested they go somewhere else to hide, as they had made a lot of noise. 

Smart lad. Note again that this decision was far more important than any spell or weapon they had, as the security robots would be showing up at the location where they made the noise soon.

Challenge the player, not the PC.

They thought to go back to one of the first rooms they tossed, near the chute if they needed to bail. They went there and cast an Augury to see if it was smart to stay in that room, the answer came back “yes”, so they camped there. It takes a turn for the HP used for a Cure Light Wounds to return, two turns for a Cure Serious Wounds. I rolled for encounters and nothing came up.

Then they headed for the chute. This one was working, and the party phantasmist took it down. This was another interesting moment, the phantasmist has few HP and bad AC, not a great combination to take the lead, but he wanted to explore to see what was there, so away he went. The entry to level 2 was closed, he let go of the ladder to investigate and discovered what happens when you are moving in a direction in zero gravity then let go of your tether. 

He spun around and eventually grabbed the ladder going up. I rolled for wandering monsters when they were focused on the chute, but none came up. They discussed what to do, and considered lashing together two ten foot poles and using that to anchor a PC in zero gravity trying to open up the door to level 2. 

At that point, the phantasmist went back in and went down to level 3, where the door was open, and saw the jungle level. 

When we stopped, they were discussing whether to try and break into level 2 or go to level 3.

Observations

Refereeing Barrier Peaks is, IMO, quite demanding of your ability as a ref. Why? Because it introduces a metric ton of things that are not covered in the rules, so you have to make adjudications. I find that this sort of stuff comes up every session, but in modules like this even more so. I have already found a ton of issues that I have rules for as I have run this module before, but it seems every time we run it something new comes up.

It’s one of the things that makes it exciting.

Personally, adjudicating the game world based on PC actions with player input, and mutually agreeing upon a set of odds and rolls to resolve the situation, is one of my favorite aspects of gaming in this kind of system. It requires back and forth with the players, creativity on everyone’s part, and the result is always surprising. Even if you set the odds and the possible outcomes, it is still exciting to see what lands at the table.

On the fly adjudication is one of the cornerstones of good refereeing, and it comes up often enough that it is in some ways more important than how many gaming resources you have at your disposal or how much prep you do. Even when you prep a lot and have tons of resources, you can still come up with combinations of PC actions and environmental reactions, particularly when spells and magic items are part of the mix, that need adjudication, and only some of those will be able to lean on precedent. Bhakashal has a clearly outlined and transparent process for dealing with these situations, one that guarantees fairness and fun. 

This session was also a reminder that exploration is more significant than combat in some cases. In an unknown environment like this one, they were more focused on avoiding combat and exploring the ship than they were slaying monsters. And that exploration created both tension and excitement, they were keen to see how everything worked and interact with it.

Big fun.