Building Bhakashal – Improvisation and Down Time

This Wednesday’s session was an awesome example of a whole host of interesting aspects about game play in Bhakashal, and a great opportunity to discuss “down time” activities, and hand waving, as the party had just completed an adventure and were transitioning to a new goal.

Let’s dive in.

My Wednesday group has just finished an adventure in the desert. They found the “Forgotten City”, and while they were there they opened up a hell gate. They negotiated with a pit fiend, releasing it in exchange for loot. However, the fiend betrayed them and fled to a desert city where a warlock resided, looking for revenge. The warlock showed up with the fiend in pursuit, a battle happened (where the PCs ditched the warlock and let him fight the fiend on his own) and the warlock left.

The party had travelled to the desert by accompanying a caravan. That caravan went on without them when they travelled the last distance to the Forgotten City. They knew where the caravan would be over the next week or two and knew that it would be in the desert city of Esham for several days so they could meet it there and head back to Bhakashal with them.

Travel is never hand waved in Bhakashal, they had a 5-day window to get to Esham and meet the caravan, if they missed the window, they missed the caravan, that’s how time matters in Bhakashal.

They travelled for 3 days to get to Esham, including encounters with giant scorpions and another caravan.

A few words about the “jewel of the desert”, Esham.

When I have to generate something as large as a city, I draw on the ample resources available to me as a Bhakashal referee, as Bhakashal is compatible with most old school source material. I found an old issue of Dragon that had an adventure, “Barnacus, city in peril”. I filed off the name, reskinned the city to fit a desert environment, and used that, rather than generating something from scratch.

That meant I:

1.      ---  Replaced all the elves and dwarves with equivalent Bhakashal groups

2.      --- Changed the mounts from horses to giant lizards

3.      --- I customized the random encounter tables: I rolled and determined that the powerful warlock (Haegemal the Heliotrope) who was attacked by the pit fiend in the previous sessions resided in Esham and might end up discovering the party and “having a word”, and I included an option for the PCs to meet the adventuring party they had met in the desert (who had retreated to Esham a few days before the party when they parted ways).

4.     ---  I factionalized the city, for example, I decided that the thieves guild in Esham ruled over a number of gangs, each gang competed for status and power within the guild, essentially the guild played them off against each other, taking a cut from everyone.

5.       --- I planted a few potential adventure seeds that the party might entirely ignore or pick up, for example, I decided that the city stayed closed for the night from midnight to dawn as they had an undead problem (a vampire with a group of jackalweres had been about in the area, the city leaders had sealed off the city at night to keep them out but weren’t telling the citizens to avoid panic).

There was one problem though, Barnacus is a city on a plain with a river going by, how was I to reconcile that? I could have heavily edited the map to clean things up, but that was a lot of work, and I was pressed for time.

One of the things I have come to realize about refereeing is that my job is to INTERPRET the prompts I am given. Since this city had a body of water, I had to interpret that in some way. I decided that the city was ruled by a bit of a megalomaniac and was within about 3 miles of the desert border, so they built a canal from the hills to the city, fed by water from the mountains. Haegemal bound a powerful water elemental to the canal to ensure that water would flow freely from the icy mountain heights to the canal every year.

This immediately created a host of implications, since desert dwellers want water, the canal would have to be monitored regularly with patrols otherwise everyone would be trying to get water to use for irrigation and other things and would dry it up or destroy it. Taking drinking water would be fine, and indeed, Esham’s ruler became immediately popular after allowing this to happen, giving parched, weary travellers a source of refreshment. However, anything else would be a problem, and the canal would have to be policed, drawing away troops and resources and creating dissent amongst the city’s population, who grew to see it as a profligate waste of resources.

One map feature had suddenly given my desert city a unique feature that had factional implications.

Now, since this was a brief stop before leaving on the caravan, we could have resolved everything with a few quick die rolls and a “two days pass and now you leave”.

But that’s not how we do it in Bhakashal, instead, we play it out.

The party arrived in Esham at about 2 am. They were blocked from entering until dawn, but not told why. This plants a seed of interest in the group as to what the problem is, but they aren’t willing to push it, and wait until dawn to enter. They pay the entry tax, tipping the guard who lets them in, and in exchange they are given a recommendation to stay at a particular inn.

They find a stable to take care of their mounts and get rooms at the inn. These interactions are simple and quick, governed by encounter reaction rolls with various modifiers based on them being outsiders, etc. Most of these interactions go fairly quickly, and unless the PCs want to try to get information from the NPC, or haggle a deal, they take up little time. Sometimes a conversation will prove fruitful and last longer, sometimes it will lead to more.

One of them asks around and finds the caravaner’s guild (a feature in my game world, every city has guilds and a guild dedicated to caravans) and through them locates the caravan they are joining to return to Bhakashal. The caravan master, Craight the Swift, is pleased to see them again (fearing they would  have died in the Forgotten City, or been gone too long to rejoin them) and they share details of their adventure. Craight has both saved and been saved by the PCs, so he is well liked, and the RP was a lot of fun. That took about 5 minutes.

Now that they have secured their spot on the caravan home, they have 2 days to kill before their caravan leaves, what are they to do for those 2 days? I asked the players and they decided on a few things:

1.        Several of them wanted to gamble, they were laden with gold from their adventures, and in real life the lads had been playing poker a lot, so they wanted to find a gambling house and play some poker.

2.        One of them wanted to go to the market and by an expensive, high quality “executioners hood” cloak

With all the talk of 1:1 time games downtime has become a bit of a buzz topic on Twitter. Bhakashal doesn’t run on 1:1 time, for a number of reasons. My players are not interested in making sure they exit the “dungeon” by sessions end, switching back and forth between groups when one group is in time jail, and since travel is ubiquitous in Bhakashal, the presence of “safe spaces” to retreat to isn’t always a given.

Having said that, Bhakashal is premised on the idea that time matters, and that you don’t hand wave the time required to do most tasks, instead, you play through them.

These are perfect examples, gambling with your newfound gold and buying things (e.g., “going shopping”) are standard examples of the kind of thing that many 1:1 time games relegate to back and forth email exchanges to “speed things up”.

That’s not how we roll!

The party split and we dealt with both groups separately.

First the gamblers. Three of the party members when to a gambling house, the first one they picked was the high-end place, so they wouldn’t look out of place dropping big bets.

They immediately sat down at a table when several of the players there left. I created two NPCs on the spot, a Chitin (insect folk) Mercenary named Mulk “the Cobra” Yigil, and a Saan (lizard-folk) Thaumaturge (Bhakashal Thief/Magic-user) named “Diamond” Drigart. One of the key things to remember when running sandbox games is that you don’t need to fully stat NPCs on the spot, you certainly can, or you can draw on a pregen that you have already made, but you can also just pick a race, name and class and only detail further as you need. For flair I gave the Mercenary a pet puma that sat at his feet named Grim.

Now, if this was a downtime activity in some games the referee would have say rolled dice and resolved the activity quickly, saying, “you play poker for a few hours with the locals and manage to come away ahead, with an extra 30 gp in your pocket”, or something like that.

No thanks.

We played a few rounds of poker, using dice to indicate bets (e.g., when you bet 5 gp, you place a die with a “5” up in the pot). I love running “games within games” like this, as it gives me an opportunity to run NPCs that are sources of information about the game world. We played 4 hands of poker (PCs won 2 hands, NPCs the other two), with the party betting high as they were flush. The players LOVE gambling, and love having the dosh to play big.

The great thing about NPCs is that the party doesn’t have any idea of their LEVEL, so they treat them with some respect, their pronouncements take on a sinister edge, and they do lots of speculating that I can draw on if I’m stuck. Through conversation while gambling the PCs found out about the public distaste for the costs of maintaining the canal (“A canal in the desert, they are MAD”) and that the “no admission at night” rule was linked to religious extremists who were pressuring the governor to adhere to their beliefs (not true). Unfortunately, they stopped playing before they found out that Haegemal lived in the city.

I made a note on the random encounter table to increase their pick pocketing odds after they left the gambling house, as there were thieves afoot who looked for recently arrived adventurers throwing around gold in gambling houses. This all took about 20 min.

Halfway through the game we switched over to the PC who was going to buy a cloak. This particular PC was a mercenary, the party big boi, he has the most HP and does the most melee damage in combat, with his favorite weapon, a big bardiche. He went to the market and looked around to find a tent where they were selling find quality clothing. It was early evening and quite busy (evening is cooler so it brings out many more people), and the market was filled with locals, visitors… and thieves!

I rolled to determine how long it would take the PC to find a tent selling what he wanted and got two turns. Each turn I rolled to see if the PC was pick-pocketed. In the second turn it came up positive. I rolled to see if it was successful and if it was noticed, it was successful and unnoticed!

The PC went into the tent to look at cloaks. There was some discussion with the vendor (an old, blind Chitin named Hijim who shared his shop with a pair of oversized pet spiders to dissuade shoplifting!) The player loved that he was almost blind and they had a great conversation, eventually they decided on a price. The PC reached into their pouch and found the bottom had been cut out and there were no coins left!

Since the theft had occurred outside of the shop, the thief was long gone. Interestingly, the PC lost about 50gp, not a trivial sum for most, but for an adventurer who had just come back with thousands of GP of loot, it was inconsequential.

However, they were pissed about being stolen from, so they wanted blood!

I rolled a reaction roll for the shopkeeper when he found out that the player had been robbed. The result was strongly positive. My job as a ref is to interpret that. Perhaps he was worried that a report that someone was pick-pocketed outside of his tent would get around and push away customers, perhaps he had been robbed before and was still angry, perhaps he was worried that regular thefts near his tent would make the city watch suspicious he was in cahoots.

The shopkeeper told the PC, “The pick pockets in the market don’t keep your coins on them, in case the city watch collar them and find their ill-gotten gains, they usually go down to the docks and give their loot to their handlers and return to the market.”

With that, he was off to the docks.

When he arrived, he found a group of 8 on the dock, four were emberi (human) thieves that worked the market, four were chitin enforcers (3^rd and 4^th level fighters) and one was the group leader (an ogre). The PC walked up and demanded that they return his money.

At that point I made a reaction roll, and it came up slightly positive, so the leader told two of his enforcers to “get rid of this guy”, thinking to scare him off, and not wanting to bring down the city watch on them for slaying visitors unnecessarily.

Two 4^th level Chitin fighters surrounded the PC, a 7^th level fighter. The PC gets 3 attacks every 2 rounds, and does decent damage with the bardiche. The chitin drew four short swords each, allowing them 4 attacks per round with penalties to the “off hands”

The chitin with the better bonuses faced front, the other chitin stayed on the PCs flank and back, negating DEX and shield bonuses to AC, and giving to hit bonuses when attacking from the rear. The fighter gets an AC bonus using  the longest weapon (the bardiche is longer)

Initiative was rolled, I rolled terribly (a 6 for each chitin, the worst possible result) and the PC rolled well (a 1, the best possible result), and even with weapon speeds added, the PC attacked first. He swung and missed with a roll of 2. For his second attack he rolled a hit.

In Bhakashal when you hit the enemy for the first time you roll their HP on the spot. The PCs then realized this guy was 4^th level, and they got cocky. I reminded them that a 4^th level fighter is nothing to sneeze at, and two are definitely a threat. They weren’t worried.

The bardiche strike did enough damage to reduce the Chitin to just above half their full HP in one swing! Then it was their turn. 8 attacks in total, two hit, and two more were critical hits. Since any hit in Bhakashal can be a critical hit, any hit can turn the tide

The damage done wasn’t significant, d6 per short sword with bonuses of +1 to damage for one and +3 to damage for the other. I roll for criticals, in this case there was an extra attack and a double damage. The extra attack was a regular hit, so in total that was three hits, one for double damage.

Not nearly enough to down our tank, but it did drop him to about 2/3 of hit total HP in one attack, it got his attention, and I could see the wheels turning. We rolled again for initiative, this time he lost. Initiative can chain like this, due to the dice you get two attack routines in a row. The chitin got 8 more attacks, this time 3 hit and 2 were criticals.

I rolled for the three regular hits, and then for the criticals, this time I got temporary blinding and knock back. The knock back felled the PC to the ground, costing their next action, and their eyes were blinded by blood. I rolled up the damage from the criticals and added it, the PC was now down below 1/3 of their total HP, and the next attack belonged to the chitin.

You could see it on his face, the player realized that the two combatants surrounding him gave them bonuses, and that 8 attacks per round was more than enough to ensure that at least some of them hit, and some of them would be criticals. And criticals can shift the tide.

At this point I rolled an encounter reaction roll for the leader of the gang, and he decided to call off his men and tell the PC to scram, he didn’t want to deal with the city watch tonight. The PC was suitably bloodied and beaten, cut in multiple places and blinded by blood, sitting on his ass in the dirt.

“If anyone asks, Nulgam Nix’s crew, Baya and Gurst gave you a thrashing, you blooded Gurst, next time he sees you he has my permission to cut off your arm.”

The PC fled, found the party, and promptly reported the thievery and assault to the city watch.

Now we have an enmity, and a potential encounter to add to the random encounter list, the PCs running into Nulgam’s crew, and if the run into Gurst, it could get ugly.

That’s where we stopped.

Sessions like these are the reason why I hand wave virtually nothing in the game. Yes, some encounters can be brief and involve little RP, you don’t HAVE to interact more than the bare minimum, and depending on the rolls many of these encounters will be largely uneventful. But all contain the potential for something more. Some of our best gaming experiences have happened due to a random roll at the merchant’s tent, or while gambling with the crew of the ship.

They also have the benefit of making the game world seem more real, just like 1:1 time makes the game world seem real, playing through activities like this and interacting with NPCs in the process also make the game world feel more real. It provides opportunities to learn more about the game world and the immediate environment, factions, etc., and shows the players that nothing is given to them, they have to go out and get it.

Adventure awaits!