Building Bhakashal – Session Report

My Friday group had a few rough weeks as different members came down with the same pneumonia, they are all friends in real life, so it passed around the group. As a result we have had a few sessions where only one person could make it, and they prefer not to play when that happens. So we have been doing some bookkeeping. I have redone all of their character sheets, and used some of that between play time to clarify aspects of their magic items, abilities and spells that they were not clear on.

You’d be amazed how often players don’t bother to read their spell, ability and magic-item descriptions. Part of that is my fault, I am perfectly happy to answer questions about any of that stuff, so they assume I will tell them if they don’t know. Not all of them of course, some of my players read the rule books between sessions and know everything they can, but that’s not the case for them all.

This week were all back to the table and fighting fit.

The party is attempting to slay and collect the bodies of 4 mind flayers. They need mind flayer blood so they can build a teleportation circle. They have the book that tells them how to build the circle, the other ingredients necessary to make the ink for the inscribing circle, and they have found an underground illithid city, so they have plenty of potential victims. They just need to get a few illithids, and that’s proving to be a challenge. Mind Flayers are no pushovers, and they are in a WHOLE CITY FULL OF THEM.

It was one of those interesting inversions, they spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to find mind flayers, they eventually found out that there was a mind flayer city in the underworld they could go to.

Perfect, right?

Then they got there are realized:

a)      They weren’t mind flayers, and in a city of mind flayers, they would stand out

b)     There were a lot of mind flayers there, all of whom can read their minds

Sure, there were non-flayers in the city as well (slaves, servants, laborers, merchants, traders, hunters, etc.) but the adventurers stood out as “overworlders” as well as “outsiders” and “armed to the teeth” non-flayers, who were comparatively rare.

They figured a way around that, a clever way IMO. One of the PCs is a Myrmidon, a Bhakashal fighter/magic-user, but in this case a fighter/alchemist. Myrmidons can create potions, and these are high level PCs, so in this case the Myrmidon can create potions from the appropriate fantastic ingredients (basically monster parts) with a spell, rather than needed a full laboratory.

So they decided to pose as a travelling alchemist and his retinue. They purchased a tent in the market area and started making and selling potions using the various monster parts that the Myrmidon had collected over the last few weeks of adventuring.

Flayers in the city live like wealthy Roman lords, on huge estates where they indulge their pleasures, eat brains and explore other planes in their spare time. They don’t “enforce the law” on rabblerousers, they use non-illithid troops for that. So the party had a visit from the local guards at one point, but some banter and a bribe got them to move on.

Now they had a cover, and they had managed to get information on a mind flayer who left the city on a regular basis. Most of the flayers stay in the city, but there are a few that travel around the underworld. One of those flayers, Sogogg Brot by name, was leaving in two days to head out of the city and to another city a week or so away for some nefarious purpose. This was an opportunity to get access to a flayer when it wasn’t in it’s estate and well protected.

They bribed one of the hunters who had travelled with Brot before to find out information about how he traveled, and discovered that he stopped off at a water source about a two day journey from the city to water his mounts, they were going to wait for him around there.

They left a day before Brot was going to leave, and had 2 days of travel through the underworld. That’s 8 random encounter checks (4 per day).

I find random encounter checks fascinating, particularly if you let the dice dictate the result rather than fudging to ensure there is an encounter. Sometimes they roll 4 checks a day for several days and get nothing. Other times they get multiple encounters over consecutive days, or even on the same day. Because we roll everything in the open and the odds are announced, they know that any encounter is random, pure luck (though the odds vary by time of day, and there are things you can do to reduce odds of an encounter).

So, when it happens, they react to it. When the parents came by to pick up the kids one of my kids mentioned that the players, “screamed like crazy three times during the session”.

They screamed each time we rolled an encounter.

Never let anyone tell you differently, players LOVE to roll dice, and rolling dice in the open is even more exciting. Random encounter checks are a highlight of the game, not something that “wastes your time” on the way to the real adventure.

Rant over.

Travelling through the Bhakashal underworld is a spooky affair, lighting is limited to certain luminescent mosses, striations of luminescent metals in the rocks of the cave walls, and luminescent insects that swarm around in the air, lighting things then leaving them in darkness. However, the underworld is also an enclosed space, even if the caves are considerably large, sound doesn’t disperse as much or get carried away on the wind as much (there is air movement, but not as much as above ground). So you tend to hear things before you see them, and they are often closer than you realize.

They set out and in the first 6 hour block they had an encounter right away (1 in 12 odds, encounter during hour 3). They were on a trail, all mounted, when they came upon a field of 7’ tall flowers, above which were a quartet of giant bees that had just finished with the flowers.

We rolled for surprise, no surprise for either side.

AD&D restricts encounter reaction rolls to encounters between parties that can communicate with each other. In Bhakashal you roll an encounter reaction roll for every meeting between the PCs and any NPCs/monsters/animals. In this case I rolled to see what the bees would do when they saw a party of 5 humanoids riding giant lizards. It came up neutral, so the bees buzzed off. There was a brief discussion of trying to slay a bee for monster parts, but they decided to stay on point.

The next encounter check was negative. The third for day 1 was positive. Two in one day, that was notable.

This time it was mobats. I forgot how BIG mobats are, 12-15 foot wingspans, and they have a fear cry that can mess with your party.

Fortunately for everyone there was no surprise, but they were very close.

“You have seen no trees in the underworld, but here the fungi grow as tall as trees, and for the last half hour or so you have been following a trail through a mushroom forest. As the trail bends slightly to the right three huge shapes swoop down from above towards you.”

The mobats were only 30 feet away when the party noticed them, diving directly towards the party Myrmidon, Gyre and Warlock. The Warlock had time to cast Power Word Stun, and took out one of the mobats instantly. It was, however, diving directly for  the Warlock at the time, so he had to roll a saving throw to avoid it crashing into him. That was successful, however, and it crashed into the ground, damaging itself so badly it would not be able to fly away.

The second mobat screeched as it dove towards its prey. Two of the PCs were in the AOE and had to save or experience fear. They both made their saves. The party thief spurred his mount and rode forward, swinging his sword on the way by at the second mobat as it dove towards the party Gyre, he managed to tag it with a decent strike, not enough to make it unable to fly, but enough to reduce it to almost half HP.

The Gyre caused a cluster of rocks to spray at the descending mobat (the party is travelling with an earth Gyre, essentially an “earth bender”, who can do things with rocks  and earth, in this case causing a spray of stones from the ground to strafe his opponent), this finished it off and knocked it off course to slam into the ground harmlessly.

The third mobat was heading towards the party Myrmidon. A few months back, the Myrmidon had a magic sword forged for him. He paid BIG coin to have a blacksmith make the finest sword possible using meteorite steel. He then brought the heart of a white dragon to be used in the forging of the sword. He paid BIG coin to have a Bhakashal warlock in his House cast Enchant an Item on the sword and after a series of rolls he had a +1 Sword of Ice, +3 against fire creatures, Special Powers: x2 to damage against fire creatures, and cast Cone of Cold (at 6^th level power) 2x per day.

He had been itching to use the Cone of Cold ability, and this was a perfect opportunity. He activated the cone and it hit the mobat full on, freezing it solid (doing enough damage to slay it instantly). However, there was now a giant bat, frozen like a popsicle, barrelling directly towards the Myrmidon!

He failed his save, and the frozen bat slammed directly into him, knocking him to the ground and doing substantive damage.

The encounter was a reminder of something though, the party made almost all of their saving throws. At lower levels, they failed almost all their saving throws, but now that they are all 7^th level and above, that’s changing.

Many people hate binary pass fail mechanics, they like “failure but a consequence that moves things forward” or “success with a cost”. I prefer pass fail mechanics as they help to make clear how experience and power matter in the game. As characters level they get better saves, so they save versus these pass/fail effects more often. In essence, they EARN their improved prowess through risk taking, experience and smart game play (if you don’t play smart, you don’t survive!), not because the referee saves them when it “feels right” or the game gives them an out  “to move things forward”. They feel like badasses because they ARE badasses, they’ve earned it.

Word.

They chopped off a mobat head and camped down to sleep and rest their mounts. There were no encounters while they slept, and they headed out for day two of travel.

The next encounter happened when the party was sleeping on the second night. This time they were on a plain of tall grasses, something they hadn’t seen much of in the underworld (something indicative of water sources, unbeknownst to them). I rolled for the encounter on the random encounter table and I came up with a minotaur. There were no mazes around, so why would this creature be out and about?

 As a referee your job is to make the dice make sense, so I decided that this minotaur was part of a cult, it was surrounded by 8 cultists dressed in grey robes that worship the god Nareen, Bhakashal god of darkness, rebirth and knowledge. Each cultist carried a candle holder with a candle that burned with a low blue light. The minotaur carried a huge axe and was cowled so it’s eyes were covered. Nareen is often depicted with an axe (the axe that the god uses to cut through the daylight and bring on the night), and the cultists revere the minotaur, a creature that can navigate a maze and wields an axe, as an avatar of the god of knowledge. The cult maintains a maze that they use for sacrifices, and they are travelling to a settlement in the underworld where they will find their next sacrifice to bring back to the maze for slaughter. I randomly determined that the cultists were a mix of Saan (lizard folk) and Rakasta (cat folk).

Freeform riffing off of the setting to explain random encounters has to be one of my favorite things to do at the table.

The party thief was on watch when this group of cultists approached. He saw a dim blue light in the distance. Once they were about 100 feet away they could make them out. He couldn’t tell what the minotaur was other than very tall, the cultists looked normal humanoid sized.

He called out to them, greeting them, assuming them to be pilgrims of some kind. He spoke to them in Rakasta, his language.

One of the cultists responded in Rakasta, “Do you follow the Axe?”

Nareen is often referred to as “the axe”, so they were asking if the party worshipped Nareen.

The party thief wasn’t sure what this meant, so he kind of panicked and answered,

“We follow the hammer”

That was unexpected.

It just so happens that there is a Bhakashal god named Bhammak, a god of knowledge and artifice, who wields a hammer. I rolled to see how the cultist would interpret the PCs statement, and they decided that the PC was saying they were followers of Bhammak. Bhammak is a god of a similar domain, and the followers of those gods are generally aligned.

LOL, dumb luck!

So, the cultist asked the PC to approach them.

Honestly, I didn’t think he would do it. He hadn’t woken up the party yet, they were all soundly sleeping (I did roll to see if the exchange was enough to wake them up, but it did not). For some reason he decided to walk towards them alone, between the gently swaying long grasses of the underworld, while bird sized luminescent insects swarmed above, and the dull blue flames of their candles flickered.

Players, you can never predict them.

I made an encounter reaction roll, the PCs were (apparently) followers of an aligned god, and they had made no hostile moves, indeed, they were displaying an inordinate degree of trust. The roll came up positive, and the lead cultist cast a Bless spell on the party thief as he stood there in front of the group.

He couldn’t see much of the minotaur, but decided not to try and see more.

The cultists praised Bhammak and Nareen, moved their candles around in ritual circles, then moved off into the darkness to head to the village to extract their tribute in the form of a sacrifice.

Most of the party slept through the whole thing!

Encounter reaction rolls transform the game. Changing encounters from guaranteed violence to a range of possibilities, from violence at one end to alliances and aid at the other, makes for a far more interesting game, and makes travel matter much more. It also gives you opportunities to flesh out the game world and introduce flavor.

Big fun.

We stopped there for the session.

What the party doesn’t know is that the flayer they are after is a bit of a non-conformist, he is one of the few that leaves their city (most flayers are content to eat brains and explore other realms ethereally), and he isn’t particularly enamored with his fellow flayers. So if the party approach him with their plan to slay 4 flayers, he might just be interested in helping them to do so, as he can eliminate some rivals that way without having to wear it.

However, they may just go in guns blazing, if they do that, it will be interesting, the flayer doesn’t travel alone (quite obviously) and no one in the party is currently aware that mind flayers have 90% magic resistance.

It will be interesting!